Pro Commerce

Depression and Low Birth Rate

I write this blog with inadequate data.  I can find no data on the level of depression in the U.S. over time.  The birth rate has been steadily declining since 1994.

A proxy for depression in the U.S. might be suicide, which has increased by 30% since 2000.

I know that the highest reproduction rate in all developed nations is found in Israel, the Jews in Israel.  Every other developed nation is showing a decline in reproduction.  Israel is significant to me because the Israeli army has women members meaning marriageable mates are introduced to each other. Israel also has a uniquely optimistic society.  A homeland dream becomes real after two thousand years.

My personal family data is what leads to this blog. My most recent cohort of 20-year-old children and grandchildren has more depressed members than any previous cohort. A small sample.

I believe the reason for both depression and not having children is the current prevailing young person’s worldview.  Human-caused global warming and the imminent Armageddon that follows is a good reason not to have children. Add to that the belief that America is a racist nation with a terrible income inequity problem and I can’t see any reason to have children; to create more Americans. ‘Wokiness’ is the source of depression and the anti-birth consequences.

Does all that make sense?  A generation with a gloomy world view and a history to be ashamed of means fewer and fewer children.

Please note that I consider the global warming worldview to be nonsense. The planet today has an average temperature of 57.4F, the same as the first reliable data in 1950. A country where 7 of the top public corporation CEOs are dark-skinned immigrants from India can’t be considered racist by a rational person.

Seizing Private Property Internationally

Maybe I’m a little sensitive in some way that most people aren’t.

When the U.S. orders a local government of a foreign country to seize a Russian oligarich’s yacht or jet it doesn’t seem right to me.

When our country was founded, we created a navy to protect American ships in the Mediterranean that were being captured by pirates.  Now we are the pirates.

In the case of the capture of jet planes the legal excuse is our existing military export laws.  The plane was built a decade ago and re-sold several times.

I have no idea, nor do I care, about the legal basis for this crude behavior.  It seems to violate every core idea of the international maritime laws and laws of air space.

It seems reckless.  Russia has already denied entry to a list of U.S. government officials in retaliation.  Russia and her allies could do much more harm.

I find it hard to imagine that any American who owns a ship, a yacht, an airplane or a piece of property that could be confiscated by a foreign country will go to sleep in comfort tonight.

Am I the only person who thinks that this sort of behavior on an international scale is contrary to core American ideals? The potential revenge consequences of this policy are incredibly stupid.

Proof About False Econ Theory on Inflation

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog saying that econ theory was wrong about money supply being the reason for our current inflation. The real cause is the dramatic increase in the price of oil/gas the foundation of our economy.  Just as was true in 1973.

I've thought about a proof of my position.  Japan in 1995 began a period of deflation that has continued until the present. Deflation.  During that entire time the Central Bank of Japan has been printing money. Japan for the entire time, 27 years, has had the highest debt to GDP ratio of any industrial nation.  Currently the dept is 200% of GDP.  That is proof.

 

Boudin, the School Board and Me

So much ignorance in the reporting of two San Francisco recall elections locally and nationally.  I just had to write this blog quickly. This home of Nancy Pelosi has had two successful recalls in three months and all the media I see gets it completely wrong.

Why me? What is my special insight?

More than five years ago I figured out that only a modest part of San Francisco was crazy woke, but that part of the electorate was most active, aggressive and was well organized because of the strong local unions and the most powerful Democrat Party West of the Mississippi.

The local San Francisco Democrat Party elects more statewide offices with its small population than Los Angeles with a population six times greater. Six times greater and one third the elected statewide offices.

Up until 1965, San Francisco had Republican mayors, state representatives and members of Congress.  That hasn’t been true since then, since the end of the hereditary elite that I have written about in earlier blogs.  

Three of the great leaders of the Democrat Party were San Franciscans and built the local party into the Statewide mega-machine.  Pat Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown.  The other great power was Jesse Unruh from Southern California.

What I figured out, with 45 years in local politics, was that a major part of the San Francisco electorate was Asian with conservative pro-police and pro-business values.  The Chinese had been co-opted into a strong voting group in the Democrat Party by Rose Pak who used the Democrat corruption to decisively help her voters.

The Chinese of Rose Pak along with a large Filipino group, Vietnamese and other South Asian settlers in San Francisco constituted a large near majority. This large population had common values:  they believed in the value of education, they supported the police and they were all part of the small business working population.

My idea was to start running city propositions that supported the police.  Based on these propositions I would raise money for this new pan-Asian group, find and reward the good community organizers and build a new conservative political machine.

I had to get the support of the police union leaders.  I tried for two years and failed.  I even went to the only honest politician in San Francisco, Quentin Kopp, who wouldn’t help me at the time because of his ties to the Democrat Party machine.

Those efforts five years ago are how I know why San Francisco was able to organize two recall elections and voted to recall three School Board members and a District Attorney.  

The Asian voting community was appalled by the School Board that had ruined the schools, with the student population dropping from 85,000 students in 1970 when I was involved to 43,000 today.  Many students moved to private schools and many white families moved to suburban schools. The number of classrooms and teachers remained the same and the administration expanded. The key mover in the recall was the School Boards elimination of the historic college prep high school (Lowell) because it had become 75% Asian.

The Asian community also voted to recall the openly communist District Attorney because he failed to stop the 10-fold increase in auto break-ins which affected nearly every Asian family in the City.  He allowed the open public robbery of every small retail business and the consequent closing of many chain stores that served the Asian community. He was also openly at war with the local police.

THAT is the story of the San Francisco recall elections.

Great Harm to America’s Future

That thud you heard while driving was the sound of having hit and driven over the American Golden Goose.

American industry has been getting a greater share of our GDP every year from overseas sales. That was our Golden Goose.  The incredible wealth of the San Francisco Bay Area is from the vast penetration of American tech all over the world and the resulting revenues from the Internet, phone apps and software.

Why we lose.

Just think for a moment of being a business person in some midsize country in Southeast Asia, the Middle-East or Latin America.

Let’s be an ad agency in Jakarta, a retail mall in Turkey or a floral distributor in Peru.  You want a new business program for your office computers and a good graphics program.  You want to find a retail food shop for your mall and you want to rent to a retail shop in the space next door.  You need an internationally respected audit firm.

Until Spring of 2022 the choice was easy. 

Then many U.S. woke companies abandoned their businesses in Russia: Microsoft, Adobe, McDonalds, Starbucks and Deloitte. Totally abandoned, no service no updates; abandoned.

Now you have to be concerned that your country’s government might fall on the wrong side of U.S. foreign policy like Russia did. Other countries in the world have relied on American companies but so far have not been treated as badly as Russia, except for China, Iran, India, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

From now on you will go to an Indian or Chinese firm first.  Both India and China will soon be offering direct competition for all big American tech firms.  For international retail brands you will go to Brazilian or South Korean companies.  For auditing you will find a Singaporian firm.

Say goodbye to American business growth overseas.  America has killed or seriously wounded its great commercial global future.

America had a great monopolistic advantage after WWII, especially in airlines and communications. The advantage lasted 75 years.  It has been thrown away, by a shortsighted government.

The Oil Price Means Ten Years of Inflation Ahead

Economics was created by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, and Leon Walras. All of whom worked before our modern society was built on oil; and before oil became the foundation for the modern world.

Oil and gas are the most important sources of energy for all transportation, most power supplies. Oil/gas energy is the basis for steel production and cement; the nitrogen for most agriculture comes from ammonia which comes from oil and gas and is also the basis for nearly all plastics.  

It is easy to teach economics and to get a PhD in the field without ever noticing this oil/gas foundation for the economic world.

Of course we use coal, hydro and a little solar and wind power. But it is a small proportion of our modern energy.

Our first opportunity to appreciate the oil/gas foundation of our economy didn’t come until 1973, too late to rebuild an entire field of economics.

In October 1973 OPEC implemented an oil embargo on the United States in retaliation for President Nixon’s $2.2 billion in aid to Israel to replace its military equipment lost in the Yom Kippur War. The embargo was only 25% of Saudi oil to the U.S. but it raised oil prices from $3 a barrel to $12.  Gas prices at the retail pump went from $0.38 to $0.55.

That began a ten year inflationary period. In 1979 oil prices again rose largely due to the revolution in Iran and the start of the Iran-Iraq War. Oil went from $20 a barrel to $40 a barrel.

The inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, went from 3.4% before the oil crisis to 12.3% in 1974 and remained high at 13% in 1979 with a low of 7% in between in 1976. The U.S. had a CPI with an inflationary average of 9.3% until it finally dropped to 3.8% in 1982.

We have inflation again. Rising from a CPI of 1.4% in 2020 until the incoming President Biden banned fracking on public land in January 2021, oil doubled in price and the CPI went to 7.0% for that year.

Today as I write the CPI is over 8% and I expect it to stay high and likely rise.  Inflation is now global as every country has its currency tied directly or indirectly to the U.S. dollar.

Economists still don’t see the connection between the price of oil and gas and inflation. The lesson of the 1970s comes too late for economic theory.

Oil/gas prices are the basic cost of all transportation, most power supplies; it is the basis for steel production and cement; the nitrogen for most agriculture and most plastics come from oil/gas as I said in the second paragraph above.  Those base prices slowly work their way throughout the economy around the world and ratchet up the prices of nearly everything including wages.  Most prices and especially wages and rents are sticky and only ratchet up for many years.

That is a lesson that needs to be incorporated into economics.

Sixty Years With Abortion

I lived in San Francisco 60 years ago, the so-called ‘bad old days’ of abortion by coat hangers.

I knew three women who aborted in that early period.  The first went to Tijuana where a Mexican doctor did the procedure; whatever it was, she didn’t know.  Cost was $50 plus travel.

By the late 1960s abortion by a doctor was legal in California with two letters signed by a psychiatrist that mental health issues justified an abortion.  Two friends of my girlfriend at the time chose to abort this way. The psychiatrists each charged $100 and the performing doctor who did a dilation-and-curettage charged $50.  The doctor who was young then is my wife’s doctor today, a prominent female physician.

By 1971 I was on the board of the Point Foundation and made a grant to Dr. Harvey Karman’s two female allies who came to San Francisco to train a dozen doctors and nurses to do a vacuum aspiration form of early-term abortion with the Karman Cannula.  They set up a clinic across the street from the University of California San Francisco Hospital and Med School and charged $25 for an abortion procedure that used a seaweed cylinder to open the muscles at the entrance to the uterus and then used the Karman Cannula for extraction.

Roughly a year later four nurses from Oakland came to my house and proposed a similar clinic in Oakland that would charge $50 and add a pre-and post-op discussion with the patient.  I made the grant.The four nurses lied to me. They used the money to organize picketing of a porn theater in Oakland.  A key learning experience for me about the Puritan future of the abortion issue!

A few months later, in January, the Roe v Wade decision became national law.   

The most interesting subsequent information came from a book, Freakonomics in 2005 that showed the connection between the Roe decision in 1973 and the decline in crime starting in 1993 due to the decline in black babies born subsequently. Black women being the disproportionately heavy users of legal abortion.

One Giant Apology From Me

The brilliant Ruth Wisse wants me to apologize, so I do.  I apologize for my whole family past and present; I apologize to all Americans who love America.

Ruth points out in several articles that a large swath of Jewish immigrants, beginning around 1890, came to the United States with fervent communist ideas.  That is understandable since they came from tyrannical worlds and could see no other political solution to their miserable pogrom-dominated lives.  The problem is that this tidal wave of immigration to New York grew to the millions; concentrated in a new world ghetto, this cluster of Jews never learned why America was a better alternative to communism.  They never really assimilated to their new political paradise.

This cluster of communist Jews, living in America, millions of people, never learned how attached to a horrible outmoded ideology they were.  In the 1930’s they were a dominant group in the American Communist Party and its thousands of colluding front organizations.  After WWII they remained aligned with communism and the Left.  Even as the murders of Soviet Jews became public they never denounced communism.  Even as the murderous rampages of Stalin and the Gulag become public knowledge, American Jews never publicly recanted their alliance with ultimate evil.

To this day American Jews are predominantly Lefties, unapologetically still in the same evil tradition.  The prototypical left-wing Jew is Bernie Sanders.

My mother and father were extreme Lefties.  My father became a rabbi to evangelize for Left Liberalism.  Even though his family were Californians from the 1850s and certainly were Republicans ( one of the second generation, my grandfather’s generation, was named Abraham Lincoln Phillips). My grandfather named my father Wendell after the great Boston abolitionist. 

My father became a Lefty at the U. of California and joined my mother’s New York communist clan in his 20’s.  He was so Left that I joked with him that he believed Adlai Stevenson (Democrat candidate for President twice) was more important than Moses.  

My mother’s family were the heirs to a Prussian sect of Judaism, Ethical Culture, that was a Leftist coven.  Her brother Fred Hart was an actual Marxist.  Fred made money in the stock market and was the sustaining donor of the National Guardian, a Russian communist front in the 1950s, later to become a Chinese Communist front in the 1960s. History has no record and no way of knowing that Fred provided all the Guardian’s sustaining funds from 1952 to 1972.  

My mother and her brother were the first American tourists to visit China in the mid 1960s, thanks to Fred’s vital role at the Guardian.  In that period I asked my mother why she wasn’t disturbed by the nightmares of Stalin, the Gulags and Mao. Her reply was the same as Lefties today: “Real communism has never been tried.”  

How deep was this communism?  I asked my close friend Ruth Kadish, in the mid 1990s, part of the Jewish Lefty clan, whether she had changed her mind about the guilt of Julius Rosenberg the Soviet atomic spy once the KGB files were made public.  “No, you can’t trust the anti-Soviet crowd,” she replied.

I abandoned my Lefty family tradition at age 20, having learned about the American genius from reading the Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Animal Farm and living on an Israeli Marxist kibbutz.

It is now time for me to apologize for the terrible Lefty hogwash and blind ideology that my family, a part of the disgraceful pattern of American Jewry, have spread in this great American land.  I apologize to all Americans who love and appreciate America for my family's guilt.

Data and facts

My life has been very different than most people’s.  Starting as a student at the University of Chicago, I was introduced to the concept of reading original documents. It has shaped me, positively and for a more interesting way to live.

Then while starting two corporate marketing research departments, I learned how to easily handle data. Which I have done for the last 60 years.  I did it often as a court- certified expert witness in many fields. I use data to shape my views of the world.

In 1992, looking at  global population data on a spreadsheet, I was among the first human beings to discover that the population explosion was over.  I threw a big party to celebrate it. 

A few years later I put all the data for global surface temperature on another spreadsheet and found that there was no global surface temperature rise in the past 100 years.  No rise, no way to blame it on human generated CO2.  I’ve followed temperature data ever since.  Satellite data confirmed what I had learned and reported in many blogs.  Then while showing a young friend how to collect the data, he found the most reliable numbers in radiosonde measurements accurate daily back to 1950.  Fifty seven point 4 F (57.4 then and now) no change in the global surface temperature.  Look at this chart, lower right. Surface temperature has gone down in the past 18 years. (Source.)

There is an even better source with daily data. No change from 1950 when global surface temperature was 57.4F.  Here.

Data on Covid

Now we have a reliable source (National Bureau of Economic Research) that has looked at the covid data to see what government policies worked and what led to excess deaths in most states in the U.S. (data.)

• First, closing schools was counterproductive in many ways.  Measurable loss of education and no excess deaths in that age group with or without classes.
• Mandating masks on people who were not potential spreaders, people not dealing with the public, were not productive. The closing of businesses cost millions of jobs and destroyed over a million businesses. Unproductive from a contagion perspective.
• Putting hospital patients in retirement homes created additional excess deaths among the elderly.

That data will hopefully inform governments in the future.  Governments need to act more like Utah and Florida and less like New York and California.

I end up with a unique and different view of the world because I like data and know how to make use of it.  Hopefully more people, over time, will join me.  It is comforting to be in a world of reliable first hand data.

Am I Due Any Credit?

As a business advisor it is rare to get credit for good advice.  It is even rarer to get credit for advice that has a major impact.  Most people forget they got advice and assume they would have done the right thing of their own accord.  Which may be true.  From the advisor's perspective that isn’t how the world looks.  We don’t have alternative versions of life so the issue can never be settled.

I bring this up because I just drove from the East Bay back to San Francisco across the very beautiful rebuilt Bay Bridge.  Could I possibly deserve some credit for that bridge?  I think so.

The architect for the bridge was Donald MacDonald, a client of mine in the 1980s, and also a friend. Donald wanted to know how to get more recognition for his many years of creative work.  

I made sure I was right that he had designed many parts of the spaghetti freeway that enters the San Francisco Airport; one of the most attractive freeways I have ever seen.  He said, “Yes.” I asked if he had done any other government architecture.  He said he had done the pedestrian overpass in Berkeley. Also very attractive.

I said he had a unique talent that virtually no other architects had; the ability to work with governments. Consequently my advice was for him to become a bridge designer. He replied that that field was already taken in the U.S. by Calatrava.  I said “no’” there was plenty of room for him.  Of course he took my advice.

Donald was noted for being a little tight with money.  He often counted the nails on his projects. My bill was $1,500, which he was slow to pay. I went to his office and offered to take a framed drawing of his, on his wall.  Which he agreed to.  It has been in my living room ever since then.

Years later when he had designed the East end of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and it was under construction, I suggested that he hire a person to put all the change orders during construction online with a short explanation of the meaning.  It would have been an incredible success. He didn’t do it.

Again, do I deserve any credit for that beautiful bridge?