Pro Commerce

Christmas season

The two previous blogs were written with the full understanding that I probably have the fewest readers right now. My blog readership has been steadily growing over the past year. I now get over 4,400 hits a week.

Since the week before Christmas, until now, the number of hits has dropped to 1,000 per week. I think a lot of my readers may do their reading at their desks at salaried jobs. Maybe?

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Over Christmas the local California Nurses Union went on strike in San Francisco against the Sutter Hospitals. The union only negotiated for three hours before going on strike. What they wanted was a closed shop. One San Francisco hospital (Children's) is unionized and two aren't. Two others are staffed by nurses who left Children's and are anti-union. The union demands that the other two hospitals be forced to join the union.

Before going on strike the nurses at Children's hospital left open needles, unsafe drugs and unhygenic messes in every possible hidden spot .... knowing that a Medicare inspection was scheduled for the next day. Forget the safety of the patients.

That seems to be what a union can get decent people to do.

I’m not telling

I choose the day I have the fewest readers to let you know about the biggest outrage of the past several decades.

Since 1960, the number and magnitude of fires, residential and commercial, in the United States has dropped more than half, while the population has grown by nearly one-quarter.

The main reasons for the decline in fires are better fire retardant material on mattresses, decline in smoking, better fire-suppressant building codes and better fire alarm systems.

The outrage is that the number of fire-people has steadily increased during this time and the so has the number of fire stations.

In San Francisco, where the population has been the same over forty years, fires have decline more than 60%, the number of fire-people has grown and the number of stations is the same. Ambulances operate out of fire stations to make them seem busy. Big fire engines with resuscitators are sent to every 911 heart attack.

It is up to you to figure out why this story hasn’t gotten out.

Starbucks and Walgreens

I pointed out earlier that my beloved city (San Francisco) openly hates business and does everything possible to keep new business out and to drive out business that is here. Nevertheless business wants to be here.

What we get are businesses that are skilled at big city manipulation (not necessarily direct bribery).

I counted the data. In the latest phone book. During the past decade San Francisco has blocked new stores for Target, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Sears, Ikea and Prada. We really missed out on Prada.

We only allowed Trader Joes one new store in a housing project and blocked several others.

All the while, Walgreens, a superb urban political warrior, has gone from a little over a dozen stores to 55 stores. Starbucks, outright banned in many neighborhoods, has opened most of its 68 retail stores. Over scientifically unsupported strong opposition to evil electrical radiation, two large wireless networks have been installed in San Francisco and both networks are growing.

So, San Francisco ends up getting the political sophisticates of the business world and misses out on the naïve innocents.

Not a smart move for labor or new jobs, but that’s what happens to an appealing but anti-commerce town.

Two great columns by Brooks

The man who is emerging as the leading public intellectual of our time is giving credit to other public intellectuals.  My first requirement of a genuine thinker is that he or she give full credit to others whenever possible.

David Brooks, in his Saturday 25th and in today’s NYTimes column has given his Hookie awards to writers of important 2004 articles.  I have previously noted several of these important articles for my readers.  I recommend most of the others that Brooks lists.

You also know, from reading this blog, what the prevailing discussions of our times are about.  The Hookies are about good contributions to this Great Debate.

What I now want to point out is the importance of Brooks naming his award after Sidney Hook. 

I read several essays by Hook when I first went to college (U. of Chicago) in the mid-1950s.  The essays were not in the curriculum since Chicago was not much on pragmatism in its formal courses.

Sidney Hook immunized me to the evils of communism.  I didn’t finally reject communism and Leftism, as well, until I had read Orwell’s Animal Farm and lived it on a kibbutz a few years later.

Hook raised, in my mind, the question of whether the Communist Party should be allowed to exist in the U.S. since the CP had a goal of eliminating democracy.  Hook said the answer was no.

Hook’s powerful logic has always entranced me.  Reality didn’t come to bear on the matter until the late 1980s when Daniel Ortega, in Nicaragua, eliminated future elections and the National Islamic Party, in Algeria, banned future elections. 

What Sidney Hook’s brilliant mind worried about became a reality. 

A party with the goal of eliminating democracy can not be allowed to participate in a democracy. Period.

Is it coincidence?

Islam may have promised Yasser Arafat a thousand virgins when he died.

It looks more like he will end up with one Susan Sontag as his companion. Perfect timing you two.

Yes, Alfred

Several friends have asked me about the Alfred Kinsey movie because I know the subject well. I was involved with the National Sex Forum for more than a decade, helped start the San Francisco Sex Information Hotline and was on the Board of SIECUS a New York sex education group.

I knew Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey’s co-author and close ally. I don’t know if the movie captures Kinsey, his biography does.

Two things the movie does not capture is the fact that Kinsey died of heartbreak over the end of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the resultant end to his beloved research. The second is something that few people know, that the Kinsey research methodology was superb. The best possible methodology.

Kinsey researchers used a coded questionnaire page, with all answers coded so that only Kinsey trained researchers could read the results. Real confidentiality.

I may be one of the few people alive that can verify this last statement about the “best possible methodology.”

In 1985 I debated Dr. Peter Sherrill, who later became one of my closest friends, over the issue of classic random sample versus a Kinsey 100% group sample. The debate was public, in a California Public Utilities Commission meeting room. I was on one end of a ten-foot table representing Public Advocates and Peter was at the other end representing Field Research and Pacific Bell.

Two experts on survey research brought together to resolve a thorny issue of public concern.

In 1984, some Mexican labor activists reported to Robert Gnaizda (Public Advocates) that farm workers in Salinas had monthly phone bills of $32, with every feature from call forwarding to three-way calling. None of these farm workers could speak English.

Gnaizda phoned around the state and found that the same phenomenon was occurring in Chinese and Vietnamese communities.

What was happening was later proved in utility hearings. Pacific Bell sales people, who had strong prize incentives for signing up customers, would sign up a customer for the maximum phone package of $32 anytime the sales person reached a person who didn’t speak English. Don’t speak English … you just bought $32 a month of technical phone services.

The public debate between Dr. Sherrill and I was over the issue of measuring the extent of the marketing abuse damage. How many people had been signed up for services without knowing what was going on?

Dr. Sherrill made the argument that classic random phone sampling with multi-lingual interviewers would find the correct answer. I argued that the most reliable method would be a 100% in-person sample of ethnic groups. The survey money would be paid to the ethnic organizations for 100% turnout and participation of their members. This is the Kinsey sampling method.

We were both persuasive or maybe we both weren’t. Pacific Bell was ordered to do both kinds of sampling to find how many people had been cheated and how much money had been falsely taken from non-English speakers.

Dr. Sherrill (Peter) and I designed and agreed upon the questionnaire.

The day arrived when the computer printouts from both surveys were ready. Peter and I sat down in a Corey Canapary & Galanis Research office (they had done my ethnic group survey) near Union Square. We looked at the responses to the first question. Then the second question, then all the questions on the first page, then we rapidly went through the entire printout.

The answers were the same from the two distinctly different survey methods. I don’t mean the same in a statistical sense, I mean the same in the sense of being one or two points different on every single question.

Peter and I were stunned. As professionals we reverted to the term “robust data” meaning the truth will out regardless of the method. But we were still stunned at the nearly identical outcomes.

Back to the movie about Kinsey. This research in 1985 was probably the most careful, thorough and reliable proof that the Kinsey research method was excellent. Superb.

Peter and my research results were never publish in a survey research journal.

Oh yes, Pacific Bell had to pay $60 million in refunds and $16 million in penalties.

Even Bernard Lewis

Even Bernard Lewis seems to get it wrong. Lewis talks about the Arab world longing for the great historic period of ascendancy of Arab Culture.

The Arab world talks about their great past.

The idea that the great Arab past ever existed and has any relationship to the contemporary Arab world is wrong.

Saladin, the highly revered Arab military hero only has a place in a fallacious history. Saladin’s army indeed drove the Crusaders out of Palestine. However, the Crusaders he drove out were the fourth generation of Christian descendents who had little or no military capability and nominal contact with Christian Europe. Saladin’s army would have been incapable of fending off the soon to arrive army of the Third Christian Crusade. That thankless task fell to the real military might of the Middle East, the Turks.

The great thinkers of the period were al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna and most importantly Averroes. (These are the Latinized names we know them by.)

These great men were part of an Islamic society made up of Moors, Berbers, Moroccans, Persians, Turks, Indians, Jews and Arabs. The great Islamic society, of which these men were part and from which they drew their heritage, was cosmopolitan and diverse for more than two centuries before them and after them. They were part of the great triumphal period of Islamic Culture that stretched from Spain to Indonesia.

Does any of that diversity exist in any Arab country today? Of course not. Arab societies are the most ethnically homogenous populations on the planet. There is no connection between the great diverse Islamic Cultural world of a thousand years ago and the ethnically pure societies of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad or anywhere else in the Arab world. It wasn’t Arab culture that deserves respect; it was pan-Islamic diversity that produced Islamic genius.

I must make one minor amendment to my point. Arab societies have had a great tradition of Arabic poetry, I’m told, several millennia old. Like most poetry, it is language bound and most of my readers, myself included, will never appreciate it.

Retreat

I have been on retreat for the past four days.

When I am on a retreat I‘m alone, I sit zazen for long periods, take long slow walks (very slow), do no work and most importantly, I eschew all media.  No phones, no reading, no Internet and interestingly, no driving or bicycle riding.  These last two seem to be media because they speed up my interaction with the world. They dis-inter-mediate the immediate world. (Note all these words focused on media.)

I am courteous while walking in crowds and will briefly say hello to people I know.

This works for me. I've done it at least once a year for thirty years. I have several friends who are Zen teachers and they assure me that the way each person handles a retreat is different, unique. 

The few days of isolation is invariably painful but I end the retreat joyful and often ecstatic.  Happy to rejoin the great modern world of commerce.

As you can see from the posting dates of my blogs, I have written blogs during my retreat.  I have always done art, sculpture and music by myself on retreats.  This time I tried writing blogs, and it worked fine just as art has in the past.

Hippy roosters

I have spent many years wondering why the hippy movement died out in the mid-1980s.

I think I have the answer.

First, I have argued, as have others, that the sexual freedom of the baby boom was the result of demographics.  I wrote about it in Baby Boom II.  When an age cohort has far more members than the cohort ahead of it, we get an effective surplus of women.  Women historically tend to mate with men a few years older than they.  So the large cohort 1946-50 had far more women than the small cohort ahead of it 1940-45.  Women under these circumstances seemed to be very generous with sex.  I remember it with ecstasy.

The sexual freedom seemed to last for fifteen years until about 1980 when it became less casual and less available.

This leads to my second and main point.  From personal experience, what I remember happening is that the alpha males who had gathered and enjoyed many women began to squabble among themselves.  I can remember many communities falling apart in battles over women.  Women became angry with men for taking advantage of them and men seemed to fight each other over the issue of sexual license.  Me included.

I record this for the people who will some day seriously look at the hippy period.

Greatest minds

There are two stores “out in the avenues” as we San Franciscans say, that are interesting.

The first one reminds us that there are no people called Asians. The Lao are no more like the Chinese than the Chinese are like the Japanese. Yet, there is a 10,000 square foot Asian grocery store. The store carries tens of thousands of items, of which no more than 2% are available in Safeway. The food stock comes from every country in Asia and a wide range of people from the Pacific and South Pacific shop there. The neighborhood is the safest in San Francisco (except for auto theft).

Adjacent to the Asian grocery store is the Urban Farmer. A friend of mine started it in the late 1970s, officially in 1981. The friend is Tom Bressan. Tom now has three thriving stores. I can remember when Tom just had an idea. Several other people started similar stores; only Tom made it work.

Which brings me to the main theme of this blog: are we living in the time of the greatest minds in history? Clearly I mean commercial minds.

In just the past few decades we have seen Wal-Mart (Sam Walton), Microsoft (Bill Gates) and Starbucks (Howard Schultz) become global companies.  GE (Jack Welch) invented the cumulative conglomerate, Warren Buffett created the perennial high return stock portfolio, Fidelity (Ed Johnson III) grew mutual funds to gigantic size, IBM (Lou Gerstner) re-invented itself, Jeff Bezos created a new type of business and Citicorp (Sandy Weill) invented the diversified global bank.

This is obviously a tiny segment of a much larger and more impressive list. I’m just suggesting that we live in the time of the greatest commercial minds in history. Only J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, J.C. Penny and Theodore Vail seem to match our current crop.

Hippies

Christopher Hitchens reviewed three books on hippies in this past Sunday NYTimes Book Review. From what I can see, these books had little or nothing to do with hippies.

I was in the middle of the middle of the hippy scene. There are two clues as to whether a person is knowledgeable about the hippy era.

(1) Do they mention both Salli Rasberry and Stewart Brand? These were the two people closest to being ostensible leaders of the hippie world. Every hippie knew both of them or knew a great deal about both of them. Rasberry was the leader of hippie style and explored every avenue leading from “live in the moment for joy.” She explored, sex, food, music, openness, child rearing and daily life. Rasberry created the hippie style.

Stewart was the leader of the “we are as gods, we can do anything.” Both the Rasberry and the Stewart parts of the hippie movement are with us today.

(2) Do they conflate hippies with the free speech movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement or the Black Panthers? If they do, they are wrong. These three political hate groups (now that we’ve seen political hate in the open form of hate Bush, we can historically go back and use the term hate groups to apply to earlier movements) had nothing to do with hippies.

I personally knew Mario Savio well, I still know David Harris and I was a friend of Huey Newton. These three hate groups probably harmed the hippie movement because the hippies tried to love the hate groups by coming to their parades and events naked, dancing and singing.

Turns out, hippie love had no impact on hate. The lovers just finally realized how wrong they were and moved to the country.

Old age isn’t for sissies

We had lunch with Ruth and Morrie on Friday. The best Osso bucco I’ve ever eaten is at Satyricon on Market and 15th.

Ruth and Morrie are in their 80s. Ruth said that someone should make sure that life-extending medicine doesn’t exceed life-enhancing medicine.

Ruth, I think commerce is doing that for us. Life-enhancing medicine is doing extraordinary work. Lets begin with dentistry. The worst pain of the 19th century, our teeth, has moved into the unnoticed realm. We can chew indefinitely with no pain.

My personal favorite is laser eye surgery. It can get rid of glasses and cataracts. For us reading bloggers, that is a blessing.

Hip replacement is a winner as are many other forms of surgery that start making improvements from birth, such as cleft palates and leg and foot deformities.

I’ve left out many, because my point is made with just a few examples. The winning example is, of course, Viagra.

I have to add a note of caution on the last. A single friend of mine in her mid-sixties reports that a few of her longtime good male friends have become a nuisance lately. Now that they have Viagra they are hitting on her.

San Francisco survives

I expect San Francisco to survive.  I don’t mean in the sense that there will still be Victorian houses in 2104.  Of course there will be.  The city will look pretty much the way it does today a hundred years from now.  Cities hardly change in a few generations, even with wars and earthquakes.

What I mean is that I expect the city to survive as a viable and interesting place to live.  The magnetism of tolerance will continue to bring interesting, different and defiant people here.  The power of nine million tourists will continue to attract commerce in its verdant abundance.

What I have concluded, as I watch the city bark viciously at business and watch the State wreak vengeance on the locals, is that the political structure of the city lends itself to survival in spite of the malicious and snotty anti-commerce attitude of the powerful 8% of the population that votes for Lefty lunacy in elections.

Forty commissions run San Francisco with about 300 mayor-appointed commissioners.  Once the mayor has made the appointments, in the first six months in office, the city is run pretty much by the commissions and the bureaucrats who report to them.

The way commerce works is to solve problems.  Commerce is a problem solving institution.  So the way commerce has in the past, and will in the future find to solve political problems in San Francisco will be pseudo-bribery.  That means hiring expediters to surmount political hurdles. 

In San Francisco, the best expediters are disabled lesbians.  I kid you not.  We are deeply PC here.

I’m counting on our disabled lesbian expediters to keep commerce happy in San Francisco and protect the future viability of the city.

San Francisco punished

Less than two weeks ago I wrote a blog that points out the way San Francisco (and Alameda County) are being punished by the rest of the State of California for our political lunacy.  San Francisco and environs are the bright blue part of California and maybe the bluest part of America.  Our beautiful Bay Bridge, under construction, was cancelled and replaced with a freeway on-ramp.

I expect much more punishment of San Francisco over the next decade.

This political stance is the logical consequence of a century of antagonism.  San Francisco has been different from the rest of California for more than a century.

San Francisco didn’t get punished politically for three reasons.  San Francisco was big, rich and politically powerful.

San Francisco actually shrank over the past fifty years and California grew rapidly over the past century.  Today, the size of San Francisco is insignificant. (About 2% of the state population.)

San Francisco was rich from the gold and silver mining of the 19th Century and the railroad barons chose to settle here.

San Francisco’s hostility toward business drove away every large national company that was founded here.  Today only two are left, The Gap and Charles Schwab, and neither is very important.  (One large company has returned, unheralded, Wells Fargo Bank.)

Lastly, San Francisco has been a bastion of powerful political bosses from Abe Ruef to Phil Burton, to Willie Brown.  Those days are gone.  Sen. Diane Feinstein can’t represent San Francisco; she has to represent the state.  Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi can’t do much for San Francisco; she has to head the failed Democratic Party. 

The remaining elected officials are political and moral dwarfs.

San Francisco has not changed, but now there is no one to protect San Francisco from the century of hostility that we have created around us.

(Incidentally, I took the first version of this bottom photo in 1972 for a postcard I used to promote the Third World Tours of San Francisco that I started.)

Heads-up

Some have called David Fischer’s Albion Seed the most significant work of American history is several generations.  I include myself in that group of people who appreciate Fischer.

Fischer has a new book that is reviewed by another of our public intellectuals, Virginia Postrel, in the Sunday Dec. 19th NYTimes.  The book is titled Liberty and Freedom.

Postrel likes the book, but is critical of Fischer, whom she appears to know, for his inability to bring the book past 1947.

  He's stuck with pre-1947 values.  That's fine for an historian.

Fahrenheit 104

I stayed in a Wyndham Hotel in Colorado Springs for a wedding occasion. I had the most unpleasant shower of my life and I will never stay in a Wyndham Hotel again.

The hottest water in the shower was tepid. Others I talked to agreed with me. The manager said it was a legal-liability issue.

Now I know what the problem is. The Federal Consumer Protection Agency mandates hotel shower temperatures at a maximum of 104 degrees.

Does this temperature mean anything to you?

I have a hot tub with an electronic thermometer so I know water temperature. My granddaughters (aged 4.5 to 7) this Thanksgiving, frolicked in a 104-degree hot tub the way they frolic in a summer plastic pond in their backyard. Its lukewarm temperature. The girls can get into 106-degree water without saying a word about it being hot.

I’ve tried to see how hot water can be for me. I went into a hot tub at 117 degrees in Nevada and stayed for a few minutes. I had sex with a prominent writer in a hot tub at 116 on a cold night.

I regularly sit in the hot tub at my house at 108 to 110. The public hot tubs I go to in Tokyo every summer are 108 degrees.

How did the Federal Consumer Protection Agency decide that I have to take tepid 104-degree showers? How can a hotel abide by that insanity and hope to stay in business?

Compromise with insanity: the bath in the home I stay in Tokyo has a red button that has to be pressed to raise the temperature above 104. I’ll go for that, clearly informed consent when the water temperature is above the tepid level.

Corporate Zombies

A friend sent me the list of the following corporations with a request to select one for a five-year investment.

What I would like my blog readers to do is select the Zombies on this list:

Genentech
Vivendi
Virgin
Verizon
Apple
Starbucks
Google
Altria
Avid
Smith & Wollensky

A zombie corporation is the by-product of a dead cash cow. Two companies fit this description, one other has some similarities. Verizon and Altria are zombie corporations.

Verizon was once part of the Bell system and was broken off by anti-trust decree into a dead telephone company (no future) with cash flow from copper wire telephone subscribers. Today it is a bucket of cash looking for something to keep the cash alive.

Altria is the same thing. The dead cow was a cigarette company still gushing cash. The professional managers are trying to keep the cash alive.

Vivendi is more of a Frankenstein than a zombie. The cash cow is a French water company. The gushing cash was used to buy companies in the entertainment business. Many corporations have gone this route and become successful.

There does seem to be a difference between marrying a rich woman and using her money (Vivendi) and a vulture eating the flesh of a dying entity (Verizon and Altria).

I have no moral judgment about these two companies, commerce is not a moral system. I just want to point out that they are not the same as Apple, Genentech or Google, corporations still connected to their founding identity.

Index crashing

I find that the amount of “hate Bush” around me personally, in San Francisco and in the press seems to be dropping precipitously. If there were a reliable index of Bush hate, it would have crashed. Why?

My ex post answer is that a large part of the Hate Bush movement may have been anger at the 2000 Electoral College that chose a minority candidate.

I know I would feel the same way if Ohio had gone the other way … a minority president may always face serious disrespect.

This could be a continuing problem with an Electoral College that has the characteristics of a random number generator.

Therapy?

A friend and I were having coffee and joking about a flyer for a somatic-therapy treatment available a few blocks away.

I realized as we talked that my own work leads to a radically different idea of therapy than the currently prevailing one.

Please indulge me. This blog goes from the mundane to the abstract, usually without warning. This is a particularly abstracto/practical blog entry.

Contemporary philosophy has a little something to contribute to psychotherapy. The contemporary view is first that our communally perceived reality is the result of the concepts built into our language and second, that our worldview grows out of our socialization. In short, we see what we’ve learned to see in the world. Hippies came to this conclusion very quickly while taking LSD.

The first thing psychotherapy hasn’t learned is that if people are having problems, the problems most likely arise from the patient’s worldview being a poor fit to the physical and social world that the patient lives in.

Forget your parents, forget your Oedipus complex --- we need to learn how to learn from our experience and how to change. When something doesn’t work, we need to learn what is in our worldview that was wrong and figure out what we can do to change it.

A therapist has no unique way of knowing what we have to learn. The therapist can just help us to be a better learner, so we can modify our worldview. Therapy should focus on worldviews and how people can learn to change them. In short, you stubbed your toe, either learn to watch where you’re walking or learn to wear boots.

My personal contribution to psychotherapy would be to put a sign in each therapy office that says: “We can’t have a very deep understanding of other people so don’t try. By the way, others can never really understand us either.”

I wrote about this in an article a few years ago, concluding that the differences between all individuals are so great that we can never have much of an understanding of each other. We just do the best that we can, it is always superficial.

Appropriate psychotherapy would simply advise each person to accept the limitations on their ability to understand other people and especially to have low expectations about other people’s ability to understand and appreciate us.

Decades ago, I wrote a paper to also suggest that therapy should copy the practice of monasteries and religious retreats; therapy should be done early in the morning before sunrise. The premise was that we recreate our selves everyday. There is an ontogeny of personality. The time to fix a personality is while it is being daily re-formed.

Natives are restless

The best thinkers are usually people who are most accurate in describing and explaining the times they live in. We can never have much perspective on our own times but wisdom is the outcome when we come close.

Let me comment on the rebellious mood of our time. There isn’t any. When the social activists and public rebels are rap singers who shoot each other and when the intellectual rebels list Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore as their top gurus, my point is proved.

The people leading the most contented lives seem to be in the outer reaches of the suburbs, the exurbs. They work in the outer ring of suburbs, have high incomes, big houses, fill their lives with products and family. They seem to enjoy the American dream without irony. They have a childish innocence and glee.

The most excited and stimulated people work with ideas, mostly business ideas, in consulting firms, think tanks and in top management of innovative firms.

The happiest people are self-employed. They do work that they love and which allows them to shape their own lives around their livelihood. 

What do you see?

Marilyn explains

When I stumble on a copy of the Sunday Parade magazine, I invariably read the Marilyn vos Savant column.

Today Marilyn answered a question correctly that I had incorrectly answered for a friend of mine.

My friend wanted to know why the expiration date on some of his medicines were so short, such as an athlete’s foot powder with a one year expiration date.

My answer was that half of all people so badly misuse prescriptions that doctors and pharmacies put on short dates to make sure the medicine isn’t re-used for the wrong purpose years later and because the short date might make people more likely to follow the correct course of usage.

Marilyn says I’m wrong. The real reason is that the FDA requires drug companies to justify the stability of their product, sometimes just a stable mineral, and it is too costly to justify a five year date. Proving stability of a drug for a multi-year period is costly and time consuming. It is just easier to put a one year date on the medicine and save money in getting marketing permission.

I have been a fan of Marilyn since she published the Monty Hall (3 doors and 2 goats) probability problem. It took me two weeks to figure out. When I did, I had to go to an obscure neighborhood library to get the math journal where the problem originally appeared.

 

Bushman of S.F.

The photo shows a fake bush next to a garbage can on Fisherman’s Wharf. Behind the bush is a tall black man who periodically jumps from behind the bush to scare passing visitors. There is usually a group of people on the other side of the street watching the proceeding and sometimes laughing. The bushman, on occasion, puts down his bush and crosses the street with a hat extended to collect donations.

The City has tried three times to arrest and try the bushman but failed each time. No jury in San Francisco will convict a poor black man who has figured out a way to make a living, regardless of the moral questions about his behavior.

This is another case of politically correct San Franciscans doing harm to innocent people. The business people on Fisherman’s Wharf hear complaints about the bushman all day every day. Most people don’t like to be scared by a bogeyman. You’ll note that bogeyman has connotations of black.

It is absolutely immoral to scare innocent people, deliberately, for the laughs. It is bad for businesses too.

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San Francisco gets punished regularly for its PC lunacy. We just got punished yesterday when the State of California changed a beautiful Bay Bridge cable span, in mid-construction, to a freeway on-ramp. The change was made purely to punish the Lefty parts of the Bay Area.

The punishment is not unwarranted. This part of the Bay Area that is being punished is the part that elected (and supported in a recall race) a governor who ruined the State’s credit rating, was driving business out of the state and was demanding higher taxes to make matters worse.

Earlier, the same parts of the Bay Area were punished when an exciting bicycle lane extension on the North side of the bridge was eliminated.

This is the beginning. I will start cataloging the ways the rest of California and the rest of the nation are punishing San Francisco and Lefty surrounding counties.

(Disclaimer: the architect for the Bay Bridge is a client of mine).

 

Economic entrails

As I read the economic data for the four year period beginning with the first day of this new millennium, I am struck by the similarity to the 1960s.

The 1960s were when America ended its domestic monopoly in retail pricing (courts ruled against factory enforced retail prices) and the domestic market began to open up to imports.

In the 1960s, Canon and Nikon replaced Kodak cameras, and Fuji did the same to Kodak film, Marimeko fabrics replaced Fruit of the Loom, VW and Toyota filled in for  Jeep, Studebaker and American Motors, Yamaha and Honda replaced Harley-Davidson, and Sony and Panasonic displaced Motorola and RCA.

The economic measures(pdf file) show strong growth in the 1960s.  The GDP grew 50% in real dollars from 1960 to1970 and per capita income increased 32%.  In the following decades, including the1990 to 2000 boom years, GDP grew a total 37% in ten years and per capita income 9%.

The US economy became international in the 1960s decade and Americans benefited.  It was horizontal expansion.  By 1970, the top 100 U.S. corporations were getting 50% of their profit from overseas.

I believe we are in another such horizontal expansion today. I think the horizontal phenomenon is made up of so many multiple positive forces that I can’t list most of them.

The visible forces are I can see and list are cheap, reliable and excellent air freight, nearly free voice and data communication, legal and accounting standardization, expansion of low tariff free markets, easy capital movement, global economic stability and excellent business travel accommodations (including good phone service).

There is much more that I can’t see, but I can see the extraordinary rate of international expansion.  In a recent meeting I dealt with a woman who takes any product she finds in the market and contacts the maker to offer to make the product in China with her company providing a written guarantee of the quality including the design and packaging elements.  Another friend has seen the falling dollar expand his export sales all based on Internet orders.  A realtor reports that most of the San Francisco Peninsula high priced houses are selling to Chinese.

We appear to be in a new global horizontal economic expansion.

Useful information

Wells Fargo has a new service for its online bill payers. Now you can send money from your Wells account to another Wells account. Just go to Wells billpaying and you will see a new button.

For me, the best use so far is getting and paying rent checks while I am traveling. It helps to have tenants and landlords at Wells Fargo.

Great article in the Jerusalem Post by Amir Taheri suggesting that Arabs only hate Israel because of its association with America. America is the enemy of Arabs according to Taheri.

He proves his point by showing how many governments that are not allied with America or are anti-American seem to kill Moslems with relish and no opprobrium in the Arab press.

Need international PR? The article by Taheri is found on the website of Eleana Benador. You can also see a list of important international public thinkers of our time. No lefty fundamentalists are listed.

Math for economic growth

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about global math scores and the U.S. did poorly.  Poorly only by PC standards, of course.  Asian and white American eight graders, the ones being tested, did better than international averages.

My problem is that I know math skills are vital to economic growth but the relationship between average numbers, testing and economic growth are incomprehensible to me.

The fact that Blacks and Latinos have trouble with math seems to be a personal problem for the people involved.  There are too many exceptions to suggest that educational policy is the issue.  Assimilation is the issue and that takes generations and social patience.  Some groups assimilate faster than others. (Five million blacks migrated to urban areas from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, it is their children who skew the numbers down).

The eight grade math testing gives weight to fractions.  Why do we deal with fractions in the first place.  I am a heavy user of math but I use fractions only when doing household construction work or cooking and that never requires adding or multiplying dissimilar fractions.  Leave fractions out of math, stop scaring decent kids with an irrelevant and difficult problem, do us all a favor.

What is there about the average national score on math that makes a difference to economic growth?    What we need are scientists and managers who are confident and proficient in their math.  Those groups comprise 10% of the work force.  So we just need to be sure that the top decile knows math.

Moreover, since I have used math for my entire working life, I can say clearly what is needed in the contemporary work place.  You have to be able to read tables of numbers to extract meaning, read and make a wide range of graphs, conceptualize numbers and enjoy playing with numbers.  A large number of people could be trained for that if we wanted to.  Someday we will want to.

I will know we are on the right track when I see a conceptualized number question of the following nature: How many turkeys were served within a three block radius of your residence on Thanksgiving?   

You need to estimate a few factors and multiply them together.  I would estimate my number on the side of Twin Peaks in the Castro District of San Francisco at 180-210 turkeys.  The whole point is not logic, nor keeping statistics in your head … it is paying attention to numbers.

Go Warren go

I’m a fan of Warren Buffett.  Buffett, the second wealthiest American, has made it a source of pride that he isn’t going to give away any of his tens of $ billions.  That charitable project will be up to the managers of his estate.

Warren’s (not-so-beloved) wife, Susie, died last year and left $2.5 billion to a joint foundation.  That made Warren the third largest donor in America for 2004.  Pure irony.

I want to stand up for Warren’s position that his charitable giving will come after he is gone.  I have two reasons.  First, Warren loves what he is doing, creating more business and doing it successfully.  Don’t slow down or get distracted. Keep it up Warren. 

Second, in my career years in the non-profit and foundation sector I have rarely met people I wanted to have dinner with, much less associate with on an on-going basis.  While I know a few interesting and energetic people, most of the people in the charitable world are not.  If Warren wants to avoid them --- bless him, he deserves the appellation: Sage of Omaha.

Warren saves himself a lot of time.  People who beg for millions and billions are not any different from people who beg for dimes.  “Boors and bores,” describes too many of them.  I speak from my experience as a former foundation president.

Warren also could be doing the world a great deal of good.  Foundations on balance may do more harm than good. I have trouble thinking of the few good things that foundation giving does.  The main positive example that comes to mind was the work of a member of the Mudd Family who loved Indonesian and Balinese arts.  He paid for countless performers and artifacts and genuinely created an Indonesian-Balinese art world in America.  I commend that charitable effort.

I also question public appreciation for charity.  The great benefactors of the 20th Century, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and MacArthur are still treated as corporate malefactors in most business textbooks. I can’t find a kind word that has been said about any of them.  Their peers, Morgan, Harriman and Watson, who weren’t big donors, didn’t do any better or worse in the realm of history or public opinion.

Warren Buffett, you are on the right track in charitable giving just as you have been for decades in your investments.

Ephemera

I like the word ephemera.  It is used in the book and antique business to mean non-book paper items related to a particular period, such as hippy posters and Berkeley free speech political flyers.

Today’s NYTimes is being as snotty as the New Yorker, reporting that President Bush doesn’t hang out much when he is traveling.  The Queen of Snotty Dailies said that the President spent thirty minutes at the Great Wall of China and twenty minutes at Gore Island in Senegal.

Count me in with the President.  Those are my times too. 

I saw the Great Wall, walked around on it for a few minutes and went back to sit down, drink a Coke, and talk to other people who were waiting for our tour bus back to town. One couple talked about the second granddaughter they had adopted in China and the associated heart problem the child had.  The Great Wall is thousands of kilometers long and was built thousands of years ago.  Nothing about seeing it conveys either of those astounding facts.

Seeing the Great Wall helped me understand modern China, even in less than the thirty minutes I spent looking at it.  It said to me: ‘give the Chinese the resources and they can build anything.’  The proof was seeing Shanghai. Shanghai is the modern day proof of that statement.

Gore Island is a tourist scam.  The historic site is a small mud and brick shack with a dozen rooms on an Island about half an hour by ferry from Dakar. 

I know American slave history and I know 18th Century West African history. 

Most American slaves came from Brazil and the Caribbean.  Few came directly from Africa.  Most importantly the slaves in the Americas came from the entire Ivory and Gold Coast, a tiny fraction of them came from Senegal.  The slaves shipped to the Americas were nearly all slaves captured by Africans and sold at auction on the coast for shipment to the Americas. 

Looking at Gore Island as the jumping off point for slave exports would be like looking at Plymouth, England as the jumping off point for European immigration to America.  Twenty minutes was more than enough time.

Style at age 21

One of my daughters observed that: You had better not put on weight because you can’t take it off.

My other daughter offers the following insight:  You had better be careful about your style at age 21 because you will use it the rest of your life.

She observes, and I concur, that most people we know stick with the style they were using when they were 21.  Women over 70 still wear bouffant hairdos.  Women in their fifties still avoid makeup.  Men who wore Levis in the 1970s still do.

Does this fit your observations?

Like it or lump it

It is time to focus our minds on the recent U.S. presidential elections and the Electoral College.

I haven’t seen much (actually nothing) in the way of thought on this subject and I certainly haven’t seen any statements about the reality of our electoral process.

We have a random generator to select our President.

The Electoral College is a random generator. The simplest way to see the reality of this observation is to note that one Presidential candidate won the Electoral College by a few thousand votes in one state, while losing the popular vote by 1% (Bush in 2000), and another Presidential candidate lost the popular vote by even more, by 3%, and nearly won the Electoral College, missing by only 110,000 votes in one state (Kerry in 2004).

You can lose the popular vote in the U.S. by several points, three points at least, and the Electoral College could still make you president based on a random mechanism related to a tiny vote anomaly. The tiny vote anomaly can consist of 1/100^th of 1% of the total vote (one penny out of $100.00).

Doesn’t anyone else see this?

We also learned that whoever else might have observed this random selection fact, there is no movement to change the Electoral College. A potential change mechanism was voted on in Colorado and the vote didn’t come close.

So I guess we have to like it or lump it. Random selection of the president is really consistent with the American electorate's desire to keep the two parties fairly equal.

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Disclosure:  I  co-authored a book titled  A Citizen Legislature, more than twenty years ago.  It is  a proposal for a randomly selected legislature.  I have never considered a random  process in the selection of a chief administrator.

The Great Dialog

I frequently talk about the great dialog of our day.  A new paper in this on-going dialog appeared in the Oct-Nov. Policy Review: Neoconservatism’s Liberal Legacy -- striking a balance between freedom and equality.  The author is Tod Lindberg, a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Lindberg alludes to and references several of the other papers in this great dialog, papers and books by John R. Searle, Howard M. Sachar, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Harvey Mansfield, Adam Wolfson, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer and Paul Wolfowitz.

Lindberg focuses on the early Cold War battles of conservatism and left-liberalism that were ideological about domestic policy, and nation-state oriented in foreign policy. The new dialog emerged out of realism.  The New York intellectuals, who were later called neo-cons, were struck by the empirical data that showed the extensive failures of central government domestic policies.  The neocons' political realism came first and the policy realm was filled in with a wide array of new ideas for getting the government out of social engineering.

At the same time, the economy appeared to be static and the new dialog became fixed on the importance of traditional work and religious values in the economy, in direct contrast to the prevailing hippy ethic of pleasure and living for the moment. 

By the 1980s reality again raised its head and the Japanese economy became the guiding flag of economic virtue.  The 1990s' American boom economy and the collapse of the USSR restored confidence in the inherent driving power of commerce.

The 1990s also changed the international policy debate from a nation-state debate into issues of democracy, intervention, nation building and projecting American values. The neocons were ready again with new ideas while reality trumped the old left-liberal ideology.

My contribution to this dialog deals with two areas. 

First Lindberg is using the wrong words when he contrasts freedom and equality.  He admits that he means equality of opportunity, but doesn’t like the phrase because some people need help to get to the initial level of equality.  Lindberg needs the term I use: meritocracy.  A meritocracy pays no attention to the starting point in someone's life, it only rewards people, behavior and institutions for their contribution.

The second area concerns the hippy ethic.  The hippy ethic made two major contributions to understanding the real world of commerce. 

Hippies were the first public advocates of openness and honesty.  Hippies hated the hypocrisy of the generation preceeding them, elders who drank booze heavily and pretended that sex didn’t exist. Hippies wanted all knowledge -- medical, nutritional, educational and sexual to be open.  Hippies wanted all relations to be built on honesty and trust.  It turns out that those are the true values that drive commerce as I have pointed out in many places, most recently in my book Commerce.

While the economy of the 1960s and 1970s appeared to be floundering, the reality was quite the opposite.  The closed monopolistic American market was being broken wide open and imports became significant in everything from automobiles, furniture and electronics to clothing and food.  The economy was growing, just that the growth was international.

The new dialog debate should be enhanced by replacing the terminology of equality versus freedom with meritocracy versus freedom.  The polarization of the two doesn’t look nearly as antagonistic.

The contribution of the hippies to our understanding of the driving forces of commerce -- honesty, openness and trust -- versus traditional religious notions is a great improvement.  Traditional societies are to be found all over the earth.  It is only the meritocratic, open and honest societies  where commerce thrives. Hippies seeking pleasure were true moderns -- commercial moderns.

Soviet ideology

Martin Malia, one of my heroes of Sovietology, has written a review in The New Republic Nov. 29th of four books that deal with the post-Soviet archives.

It is a brilliant article.  The point I got from it was the failure of American Sovietologists to understand the Russian revolution and the 80 years of Soviet communism that followed. American Sovietologists had it all wrong, and Malia admits it. 

Malia says the archives reveal that the communists replaced the Old Russian good and evil with the classes: proletariat and bourgeoisie.  In private correspondence from Stalin and confessions from party members, everything vital is always replete with these concepts and drew on this dichotomy. Of course, foreign policy as well came from this religious ideology.

To bad we had it so wrong.  We survived by pure luck.

This is the URL for the article.  It may not be free.

Is America Jewish?

The November issue of Commentary had a great article by David Gelernter. (How do you pronounce that name?)  The title of the article is Telling the Story of America’s Jews. He reviewed two recent books, including one I read by Hasia Diner which was not worth recommending.

Gelernter uses the review to point out that the real history of America involves only a few Jews, but they were seminal as individuals in the creation of America.  The history of Jews in New Amsterdam is only beginning to be written, but the critical importance of New York commerce and the New York commercial value of tolerance is central to American identity.

Of equal importance, Gelernter reminds us that 80% of the founding population were Puritans who drew their values, their dreams and their morals from the Torah.  America was their New Israel.  I do believe they got far in achieving that goal.

The Gelernter article is only online for subscribers, so I put it on my website as a Pdf.

Is it time for Jews?

Is it time for Jews to leave England and France?  Is it time to declare Norway an anti-Semitic state?

My purpose in asking these questions is not to measure the level of anti-Semitism in England, France and Norway, but to raise the issue of democratic countries driving out minorities and becoming illiberal havens of hate. 

England is the easiest to begin with.  We don’t doubt the democratic nature of English society, nor the long history of democracy in England.  Yet, as I pointed out in May, the population of Jews in England has been dropping precipitously in the past few decades, down by one-third by now.   I personally know that England has a large anti-Semitic population.  I’ve dealt with it over the years.  The main issue is how England has carried on an anti-Israel foreign policy for the past five years all the while BBC has been carrying on a hate Israel campaign for the past twenty years.

Considering the anti-Israel foreign policy and the hate Israel policy of the main national news programming, one has to ask what Jews inside such a country should do.  Is it possible for a democratic nation to have a foreign policy of antagonism toward a group of people, such as Israel, part of whom lives in the democratic country, the Jews, and to expect the Jews to survive in a media atmosphere of hatred?  I doubt that the answer is yes and I doubt that the majority of Brits give a damn what happens to English Jews, since I’ve seen no evidence that they do. 

Moreover, the BBC was so successful at crafting its own hate-Israel foreign policy that it crafted an equally imaginary lie about the Blair Iraq policy and finally got its hands slapped.

What will happen? Jews seem to be leaving England.  I don’t think there will be a single incident to point to, just an increasingly vicious atmosphere.

England seems to be an example of an illiberal democracy driving out a minority.

France is a more difficult question.  France is a democracy with a strong central government.  The government is openly anti-Israel and pretends to have a distaste for anti-Semitism. The media is vehemently anti-Israel and portrays the Israelis as monsters. The government in a cynical move adopted a ‘no religious wear in school’ policy.  This policy shows the unique French national form of anti-Semitism.  The French Muslims are burning synagogues and creating hate crimes so the solution is the make them more French by banning Muslim headscarves in school. 

Good idea, but it wasn’t done that way.  All religious gear except modest crosses were banned, particularly banned were Jewish religious caps (kippot).  So, Jews, who were the victims of Muslim hate, Jews who had lived in France for 1500 years were being punished along with the Muslims.  That is the French way to treat Jews.  Alternative policies would have been to ban Muslim headscarves in schools in areas where anti-Semitic acts were most prevalent.

I don’t know how Jews can survive in France, nor whether they should wait until an official anti-Semite is elected to run the government.  Chirac has already kissed the feet of Yassir Arafat -- the man who did only two things in his life, kill Jews and steal money from his own people.  That should be a sign of how French foreign policy makes domestic life for Jews a serious question.

So far, only a few thousand wealthy French Jews have bought condos in Israel, but the number appears to be growing.  Maybe not fast enough.

France is on the verge of being an illiberal democracy and could be an extreme example any day.

As for Norway, we have a country with a foreign policy that is openly hostile to Israel and apparently many domestic incidents of anti-Semitism, but there are no Jews in Norway to complain. Several Norwegians who are part of the UN in Palestine have been spewing anti-Semitic hatred. 

Is Norway evidence that an entire democractic nation can be illiberal?  I think the answer is yes. 

Does Norway’s anti-Semitic foreign policy imply that the idea of a Coalition of Democracies to replace the UN is not such a good idea?  I 'm beginning to wonder if democracy means anything positive.

The entire 21st Century may be a test case of whether democracy is inherently liberal.  Maybe it could become so by the end of the Century.  Democracy today is looking pretty bad.

Before I get a slew of emails pointing out that a foreign policy hostile to one country, such as the U.S. versus Iran, doesn’t necessarily hurt domestic Persians, I want mention at this point that there is no government media in the U.S. and there is no historic American anti-Persian sentiment to exaggerate the situation.