Pro Commerce

Epitaph for American Style Democracy

Is it my job to write this epitaph?  It looks like it.

My basic thesis is very simple.  There are two core human value systems:

1. Envy of social distance.
2. Creative human imagination.

Humans form tribes for food and other aspects of survival.  For the tribe to grow it implements a social system.  There are several social systems. The most common is a simple hierarchy with merit as its operating principle.

Most such hierarchies fail rather quickly, meaning decades or at most a century, as biological reproduction, throughout the hierarchy, replaces the meritocracy with mediocrity. The low- born meritocrats lead the revolutions.

Three forms of hierarchy have solved this problem.  The Chinese, the Japanese and the Jews.

The Chinese instituted an imperial examination to find and reward the meritocrats. This system has been in place for 1,500 years and results in an occasional century of social stability with the interruption of a periodic revolution. 

The Japanese system, on the other hand, promotes meritocracy by marriage and adoption of the meritorious members into the higher ranks of the hierarchy. It keeps an Imperial family that remains outside the power structure as a moderating force.  The Japanese social system has lasted 1,500 years with only two interruptions.

The Chinese and Japanese social hierarchies with promotion of meritocrats have solved the human problem number one, the envy of social distance.

The Jews formed a distinct social class, the Levites, the temple keepers, who were separate from the main body of the tribe. Among the Levites, meritocracy was based solely on intellectual merit, without power. The Levites moderated the rest of the society.  Jews were always a minority of outsiders living in enclaves of larger bodies.  They survived 2,000 years without any revolutions but with endless murder of the tribal members by their neighbors.

Problem number two was solved by accident on the American continent with the Louisiana Purchase giving the Coastal Europeans, with a weak social hierarchy to begin with, a vast stretch of land to be settled far outside the reach of the Coastal social hierarchy.  In that vast open land with great mobility, the Europeans established a new society with a nearly non-existent social hierarchy, local governance, for over 150 years. 

Out of that historic accident, unrestrained individualism emerged, creating the first explosion of modern commerce.  Humans, when left to develop on their own, develop a system of commerce mixed with technological insight that creates a radically productive society. 

That incredible productivity creates a prosperous middle class that provides a form of social stability. For a short time.  One century, apparently.

Then it fails, as it has in the only two countries where it has occurred. The United States and Israel.  In both cases human envy, without a social hierarchy to repress it, rises up to destroy the society. 

This is too much to write on a tombstone, and very sad for me, but the world looks this way at this time.

Our Geography Has Changed

After the recent pandemic lock down there has been a significant increase in air travel. 

I see several reasons for this movement.

The first was the popularity of college education in America.  (Table) The number of people going to college as measured by bachelor’s degrees tripled over thirty years going from 10% of the population in the 1970s to over 30% by 2000. Americans moved to new geographies after college, often the result of marriage to a college peer from a different locale.

The second was political divergence and social sorting by politics.  Beginning in the 1980s more people chose to live close to other people of their own political persuasion.  Several books have been written on this subject.

By 2000, the Internet was becoming a popular form of communication as was the cell phone with the subsequent disappearance of telephone distance charges. Friendships formed and survived geographic distances.

The final coup d’etat was a pandemic lockdown where nearly 70% of workers found they could work off-premise using the Internet and cell phones.

All four of these major social changes resulted in Americans and other global citizens finding reasons to travel, live in new locales, and feel comfortable doing it.

The Future of a Random Legislature

In 1978 I wrote an article proposing that legislative bodies be created by random selection like juries.  My friend ‘Chick’ Callenbach then offered to write a book with me on the subject.  It was called A Citizen Legislature. Published in 1981, it became part of every political science course on the planet. The original model was a Greek legislature called the Boule. Then in the late 1980s it almost became a reality when the proposal nearly became law in British Columbia, losing by only one vote.

Now America is nearly at the point of a civil war, I can see that a random legislature will become a viable choice in the discussions in the near future to resolve our close call with the precipice of democratic failure.

Would a random legislature resolve our current problem?  

That is a separate question.  My prediction that the random legislature will become a subject of discussion is an answer to a different question.  ‘Would it resolve the divergence of the American Republic?’ is not the same question.

The answer depends on my analysis of the current problem.  If my analysis is correct it would resolve our current nightmare.  

My diagnosis is that our current schism is caused by the rise to power of labor unions and labor union values.  Labor unions emerged as the only coherent power after the ruling hereditary elite dissolved in the 1960-65 period. The evidence of this thesis is the  emergence of ‘wokism’ in the U.S and Israel at the same time. And the total union control of the California body politic where unions are the strongest in the country.

With a random legislature, labor unions would not dominate the selected bodies.  There would be union members, of course, but they would be less than 7% of the citizens and would have very little direct influence.

There you have it.  My solution and my analysis.

Global News Reading Failure

I have a wide circle of friends in Japan and I read several English language Japanese newspapers.  I also have friends in many other countries and follow the press in four of them..

Each country has its own political spectrum.  The American spectrum is from Hate Trump to Love Trump.  Almost everyone in the world thinks America is predominantly on the Hate Trump side of the spectrum, if they have any opinion about American politics.  Russian and Chinese citizens do not hold this view.

Of course, in reality, American politics is divided four ways.  Half of adult citizens don’t vote. Among the remaining half the percentage is 25% love Trump 10% are in the middle and 15% hate Trump.

Why does the world have such an incorrect Hate Trump view of American politics?

Because the American newspaper that shapes global opinion is the New York Times.  Most of the world has no idea, and I can say this for certainty about Japan, that the New York Times is 100% in the Hate Trump column and has been for a decade. The New York Times also hates Israel and has for 45 years. It has hated Jews for 80 years. 

 The New York Times is the spokes medium for the ‘Woke’ world.  Most of the world doesn’t take the Times seriously for two of its three main Woke theses.  The readers of the world do not think there are more than two genders and they doubt that America has a systemic hostility based on race.  From reading the Times articles about the multiple black elected officials the readers would guess that blacks hold more elective offices in America than are found on the entire continent of Africa.  A quick search of Google would confirm that view.  

The NYTimes view that has global concurrence is the human caused global climate Armageddon.  This is not held by Chinese, Russian, Indian or African populations.

Is this NYTimes global opinion monopoly likely to change?  Only if it is replaced by some global Chinese medium or some new trusted Internet medium.  Both are unlikely.

Advertising Failure

My best-selling book, Marketing Without Advertising, explains why advertising doesn’t work except on children's products and for tourists. The book explains how to do effective marketing.

A wonderful example is in today's Wall Street Journal, (8/3/2023). 

Bud Light, the most popular American beer, insulted its clients with a frivolous marketing character who is a man dressed as a woman and being silly.  Sales since the ad campaign have fallen 26% and market share has fallen from 10% to the 6% range.

Bud Light increased its national ads from 32 TV ads the same time last year, June and July,  to 34,000 this year (yes, from 2 digits to 5 digits).  While market share dropped 2% points from 8% to 6% during the same period.

Three cheers for the evidence that advertising, even at the million dollar level, is counter productive.

Fixing San Francisco

Now I’m ready to fix San Francisco.  A Japanese friend is arriving with her family and because I can’t handle guests right now I didn’t invite them to stay with me. But then I looked up the hotel they chose.  I told them to cancel the hotel and stay with me.

The hotel they found is the BEI Wyndham that rates itself a 4 star.  In fact it is at most a 1- star in a civic center neighborhood with a large and drug addled homeless population like most of downtown San Francisco. Dangerous. It also adds a $30 resort fee for each day and never mentions the fee. No resort features, not even night stands or a desk in the room. No good restaurants within five blocks. 

My mind immediately went to Sodom and Gomorrah which God destroyed because the citizens mistreated visitors.  San Francisco is Sodom and Gomorrah for sure.

So how do we fix San Francisco?

1. We find a leader of the Asian Community and have them select a new mayor and a group of supervisors.  The Asian Community has already organized a special election to replace a communist district attorney and an idiot school board. They won easily.
2. We vote on a ballot initiative to put 5 city-wide supervisors on the 9 member Board of Supervisors. The current board is elected by district and has been since 1978.  We have a bunch of totally incompetent people that never have the City as a whole as a concern.

All of this will take about five years.  Once the quiescent city leaders see that this is a path to decency they will support it.  

The negative is that the City will have a well-run government.  The weak governments of the past 175 years has meant San Francisco has been one of the most creative and vital cities in the world and most recently created the Beatniks, the Hippies and the Gay community. That global source of innovation may be lost.  

The alternative is Sodom and Gomorrah, which I can no longer countenance.

Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier

I’ve spent my life trying to understand hysteria and made little progress.  That means it is at least four dimensional or greater.  I’ve solved some very difficult three dimensional social problems.  See here.

This title ‘Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier’ is something that president Joe Biden says often in public and has absolutely no meaning.  (1) It is a subject of hysteria because it is uniquely a sign of mental impairment in the president that is not mentioned either in ordinary public conversation, in the vast global media, nor in political fencing.  (2) Just as an unplanned large crowd is part of hysteria, just as tens of thousands turning out the night Dan White (a political San Francisco murderer) was given a judicial slap on the wrist for killing the mayor and the popular gay supervisor, the absence of any discussion anywhere, the silence, about this Biden mental synapse is also hysterical.

(3) Hysteria can be a consensus of opinion that is so strong people act on it.  That applies to the trans-American belief in the 1980s that child kidnapping was common, in the hundreds of thousands a year, so common that most Americans in urban areas kept their children home when not in school. A radical change from the decades before. Behavior that remained in the decades afterward. In fact the number of kidnapped children never changed as measured by national data. (Slightly over 100 per year in the U.S)

I conceive the hysteria space as multi-dimensional; inside the hysterical part is the human brain or mind and connected to a vast number of similar people (I can’t define similar but it can be over 1 billion).  The hysterical space has dimensional components that have multiparts which can be thought of as rooms,  (A) One part that provides instant communication to the entire space or any subset. This can be a crowd or a herd, the common conception of a mass behavior. 

(B) Another part can be a view, a perspective, a vision, an idea.  Think of it as a room. Everyone in the room, all the brains and minds in there, share this same perspective.

(C) Another space is like an anechoic chamber.  No signals pass from one person to another.  That is like the silence about Joe Biden’s spoken nonsense.

(D) Still another space is a core belief that is the ground for a whole set of worldviews.  Think of these core rooms where everyone in it thinks money is a driving motive for all people. Another room where everyone thinks power is the driving motive for all people.  These are core-view rooms. Part of the multidimensional hysterical structure.

Because this hysteria is a multidimensional space, individuals can be in multiple rooms at the same time with different assortments of other people.

Now as I begin to recognize hysteria, I see that many elements resemble what I have taught as social thought.  Social thought recognizes overarching ideas as the coherent structures of institutions.  In some ways this is analogous to the rooms or dimensions of hysteria.

The difference being that hysteria is much more pervasive in life while social thought is bounded by institutional perimeters.  People who are part of a university can be part of many institutions simultaneously other than the university and can move to another institution easily. While people who are inside the hysteria that has them believing they were sexually abused by their step father can not change their opinion readily.

How will the multidimensional nature of hysteria be measured and validated?  I have no idea. We live in a universe where most of the forces are invisible but over time they are slowly being detected.  This is another one. 

Reply to Letter From Alex

Alex, is a good friend of mine who lives in Canada. He sent me an article from the NYTtimes on the Japanese stock market. Many people send me Times articles knowing I can’t read the paper because it’s Jew hate is so deeply offensive. 

After my recent month in Tokyo I bought a Japanese ETF that reflects the whole Japanese market.  

Some mistakes in the Times article.  Tourism has not returned from China, which is the largest source of all tourism and tourist spending. That will be a great infusion when it comes.  Mostly affects department stores and hotels.

Warren Buffett bragging on the Japanese stock market is right about Japan and wrong about the trading companies he bought stock in; which is something he can't understand. The biggest trading company was my client. Trading companies can never return a net on sales much over 2-3%. But they will grow with international trade.

The China boogie man will disappear with a Trump reelection.  China is not being aggressive, we are.

Japan is strong, healthy and solving the stagnant population issue.  All good signs.  They are not nuts about 'woke' in any way.  More women are coming into the labor market; working lives are getting longer and the Japanese are not stupid about CO2 and oil.  

A well-educated, honest, hard-working population is always a good bet.  None of the rampant American crime, Trump derangement syndrome, or divisive 'woke' culture.  The Japanese are happy, optimistic and enjoying the best of modernity.  The Covid did not hit them seriously; they are inherently clean, willing to wear masks (still 90% are masking in public) and still on good trading terms with India, China, Russia and most of the Middle East.

YoMama

Do you know ‘the dozens’?

In the mid 1950s, as an undergrad at the U. of Chicago,  I had two black friends. One rich one poor. The rich one was the son of a taxi cab company owner who taught me about ‘the dozens’ and the other was an anti-racism activist who was supported by the students at Roosevelt College.

The rich one told me about a common black practice of men facing off against each other, before an audience, to master trading insults.  Most started with ‘Yo mama.’.  

One was “Yo mama is so fat when huggin’ her you have to take a piece of chalk in your hand to mark where you began.” He told me many of these.  The dozens seem to have come from Ghana.

One ‘Yo mama’ had become a jazz classic ascribed to Hoagy Carmichael, Huggin and Chalkin.

He also told me about cursing contests.  The object was to curse as long as possible without repeating.  The one I remember was ‘You ain’t nothing but a lying dillydapper, your heart pumps shit and you breathe through your asshole….. 

I later learned that my grandfather Henry J. Phillips had been a famous cursor in San Francisco Union Square in the period after WWI. He had once cursed for 30 minutes without repeating.  He had a dental office on Union Square.

The poor friend took me with him to a white barbershop on 63rd where he asked for a haircut.  The barber called the police.  It was my job to be present to keep the police from beating up my friend on the way to the police car and to bail him out.  The knowledge that this fellow was a friend of mine led to the most successful and important employment discrimination lawsuit in American history. Described in two blogs. Here and here.

Understanding America

I look at my fellow Jews who are Lefty and very close to being self-hating Jews.  Their love of the Democrat party is shocking now that it is obvious that the Left wants Jews dead.  Academia hates Jews as does the NYTimes and the other mainstream media.  Hollywood and the power elite want us dead and want the Palestinians to wipe us out.

As Ruth Wisse points out, the vast European Jewish immigration beginning in 1885 are Lefties and have been The Left since they arrived.  These people never understood where they landed nor did they try.  They lived firmly in the ignorant socialist communist world that they came from. No one ever tried to help them open their eyes and see where they had landed.

The 20th century passed these sad settlers by.  It wasn’t an American Constitutional Republic that elected Hitler and followed Stalin in the slaughter of Jewish children and their feeble protectors.  It was a strong central government that continued the pogroms of Europe.

America had two things that Jews failed to appreciate.  A government deliberately designed to be weak and grass roots. A Constitution that deliberately created a divided government run by a multitude of weak states.  And a set of Amendments designed to protect individuals and minorities.  

That is all anyone needs to know to understand and appreciate America.  Since the Jews have arrived, most of them have been part of the political movement to thwart these historic Constitutional powers.  Jews were fanatic supporters of FDR in his desire to erase Supreme Court power, to weaken state governments and the ceaseless drive of the Democrats to shackle industry, support unions and control every aspect of American life.  

America did have an hereditary elite that was anti-Jew, but Jews never noticed when, uniquely on the planet, the hereditary elite disappeared in America at the end of the 1950s.  Jews still haven’t noticed.

America did not have laws regulating Jews’ clothing or the businesses Jews could enter.  It did restrict Jews from Harvard and the elite schools but that was not like Europe where they were vastly circumscribed in every domain. 

Now the big question.  Why didn’t Jews realize that America was the great haven for them?  Jews who came before 1885 did see this and they saw that the hereditary elites were weak outside New England.  They moved everywhere else in America as my great-grandfather did.  But the mass later arrivals never left New York, never left socialism, communism and labor unions.  To this day, they have been cloistered Ghetto Jews who never left the Lefty ghetto of New York.

I Was Wrong

A few blogs back I attributed a large part of the current employment dump in high-tech to widespread understanding, from Elon Musk’s example, that more than half of tech employees are a waste.  I was wrong.  Musk found a commercial truth but his fellow tech managers are not smart enough to appreciate his discovery.

What is going on, and has been for half a year, is the consequence of the most ignorant idiotic government foreign action I’ve ever seen.  The Biden government directed American companies to stop doing business in Russia.  Many complied.  Far too many.  The U.S. government has no such power and even one company could have held up such a directive in courts for many years.

So now those American tech giants who pulled out of Russia have been slaughtered.  Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and a dozen others.  

Every business man on the planet looked at the American high-tech obsequiousness to a senile president and said ‘Am I going to buy high-tech software from a company that will not service me in the future if the American government is hostile to my government?’  The answer from any intelligent businessman anywhere in the world was ‘Hell no’.  Screw American high-tech, I’ll find a company somewhere else.

The American Democrat administration didn’t just do this stupid thing.  It banned Russia from using the global banking system SWIFT controlled by the U.S. which makes the dollar the universal planetary currency.

Now, the 100 nations on the planet, who are anti-American, are looking for ways to make the Yuan a major trading currency.  They will succeed and it will raise interest rates in the U.S., reduce American exports dramatically and cause a recession.  Maybe a long one. Good going, you Democrat anti-commerce idiots.