Pro Commerce

Deep Truth About Commerce

The modern world exists for one reason, one reason alone; modern commerce.  On the surface one sees technology as the vehicle for the miracles in the modern world, the movement of half the population on the planet out of poverty, short life-spans and away from hunger.  

Simple proof that technology is not the prime mover:  you don’t see the broad use and acceptance of technology in the parts of the world that don’t have modern commerce, areas such as most of Africa, large parts of Indonesia and vast tracts of the Middle East and the Steppes.

Modern commerce is the primary source of technology in everyday life. Russia and India are  good examples where the military makes extensive use of the latest technology but very little of it trickles down to the vast Russian or Indian population.

The same is true when you compare a small rural Iowa town with technology overflowing in every household to a small similar town on the same longitude in Puebla, Mexico, or continuing on the same latitude to the other side of the planet to Mysore in India or Astana in Kazakhstan.  Maybe 5% of the technology in a farm village that in Iowa is found in every home can be found in even a dozen homes in Puebla, Mysore or Astana. Widespread existence of modern commerce is the difference between an abundance of technology in every home and a technological desert.

Technology is a common element in the lives of people who live in the world of modern commerce.  But technology is only found in areas where modern commerce thrives. 

The two real benefits of modern commerce, the two greatest daily benefits are pervasive cooperation and an infinite array of livelihoods. 

 Pervasive Cooperation not competition.

For people whose eyes and minds are closed, modern commerce is a competitive system. For people whose eyes and minds are open, modern commerce is more than 95% cooperation every minute and every hour of the day. 

Yes, Boeing competes with Airbus, Peet’s competes with Starbucks and Taco Bell competes with McDonald’s.  But the same airline can buy both planes and a consumer can go to any coffee shop or any fast food outlet minutes apart.  That is the  strange idea of market competition from the consumer point of view.  Competition in the market means multiple businesses are clamoring to make you happy.  Acting as if they were potential lovers, going after you;  the word competition doesn’t make much sense. Lovers pursuing you, is more like it. Market competition is more accurately a love fest.

For people whose eyes are open we see employees working together, every minute of the day, supporting each other, having birthday and anniversary parties at work, being extra kind to customers and suppliers.  We see suppliers doing everything they can to help their customers with the best possible service, the latest technology, advice on best practices and useful trade information. Everywhere we look in modern commerce we see cooperation and mutual help. 

That is the incredible beauty of modern commerce.  There is no tribal rivalry.  It is the opposite of  many Chinese stores where you see fellow clan members treating family much better than other customers.  In Southeast Asia, you see Malaysians and Indonesian merchants being cold or rude to Chinese customers.  In tribal societies entire families work in the same business. In contrast, in a Los Angeles Peet’s coffee shop you’ll find a barista who is Shia Muslim, a Bahai, a Jew, a Baptist and three atheists working together effectively for years, on every shift. Helping each other. That is modern commerce versus all other economic systems.

An infinite array of livelihoods

One of the greatest benefits of modern commerce is most often overlooked.  One can find work in a very wide variety of livelihoods.  Before the turn of the 20th century, the variety of occupations was limited.  There were several types of farm workers, several types of day laborers, ministers, medical workers, lawyers, teachers and public officials.

As the government grew in the 20th century,  the need to classify occupations increased and the first Occupational Codes were published.  In 1938 the first classification of occupations  had 4 digits, for a possible 10,000 occupations with only a few hundred occupations listed.  By 1958 the list had 5 digits for a possible 100,000 occupations with less than 1,000 actual occupations individually itemized.  By the 1970s the Occupation Code list fell out of use in most of the United States, except for tax authorities,  because there were so many ambiguous multi-functional occupations and so many people who had broad occupational responsibilities that a simple occupational number was meaningless.

Today, people working for large corporations are hired with a specific occupational title but the responsibilities are diverse, complex and variable; especially where managerial responsibility is included.

A young person entering the job market has a nearly limitless choice of livelihoods and a mature worker can virtually define their own occupation.  This is a miracle of the modern commercial world. Almost limitless variety of available livelihoods,

Adam Smith, more than 250 years ago, championed the commercial marketplace where the miracle of individual greed was supreme as opposed to individual generosity.  Smith pointed out that the baker would not get up every day at 2 in the morning, for most of his life, to bake bread out of the kindness-of-his-heart, but he would out of personal income earning desires.

That was a very limited but persuasive argument for the open commercial market.  Today, with modern commerce ascendant in much of the world, we know that there are two more powerful arguments for the open market: a daily world where a wide variety of people can work cooperatively together and a world where a myriad, nearly infinite, number of skills and talents can be appreciated and rewarded.

Modern commerce has created a  miracle never seen before in human history.

Compatibility

I’ve found an element that is crucial to a couple's compatibility that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.  Physics.

The insight came when a close friend died and I asked my partner if she could have married him.  She asked me the same question about my friend’s wife.  We both answered ‘No’ and came to the same conclusion.  The reason for Our mutual compatibility was the same reason for our incompatibility with our married friends.

My friend and his wife are klutzes.  They can’t connect a TV set to the cable system, can’t assemble the simplest appliance or use their new cell phones.  

Some people are good at manipulating the physical world, hammering, sawing, attaching and detaching and others are not.  From our experience the reason for this effectiveness in dealing with the physical world has to do with their understanding of physics.

Humans develop a physical sense of the world.  What is hard, what is pliable and what is similar. That view shapes how people manipulate the world and how they direct workers around them to manipulate the world. 

I never recommended my best hired workers to my friend and his wife because they could not distinguish a hard job from an easy one and they would complain about the work done by a worker whether it was excellent or shoddy.  Neither of them could give good directions to get a job done, whether for a plumbing problem or putting a new lock on a door.

This view of the world seems to me to be a key element in sexual partnerships.  We know that smell, cleanliness, money views and countless other prominent issues are part of compatibility and are what counts when sexual attraction wears off.  I just want to add the physical view of the world to the list of compatibility issues. 

 Just a note for marriage counselors and people who counsel couples before marriage. Check on whether one or both are ‘handy’ with tools.

Good Summary

Victor Davis Hansen, one of my favorite thinkers and commentators, has written a beautiful summary of how wrong the current situation in America is for those of us who love this country and appreciate the contributions we have made to the world and to humanity.

Here!

The Woke World

I have 8 grandchildren.  It looks to me like they are nearly all ‘woke.’  What does wokeness  mean for a large new generation?  What does it mean to be woke in terms of the survival of the commercial world?

First, what is woke?  Wokies hold the following main ideas:

• America is a systemically racist country.
• Women are second-class citizens and are subject to discrimination..
• Humans are causing a catastrophic rise in global surface temperature.

I won’t argue against any of these propositions.  My job is to consider their effects on America and the larger world.

The first, anti-black racism, will have the worst consequences.  America is not racist at all.  It is predominantly meritocratic and the consequence is that American blacks are the main component of the bottom class.  Holding the ‘woke’ view that racism is systemic will only make the problem worse.  Nothing in the way of government policy or private behavior will change the Black outcome. Nowhere that blacks live, whether in black societies in Africa or in mixed societies such as Haiti or Louisiana, is the outcome any different.

But the black attitude of ‘white oppression,’ promoted by ‘wokism’ is counter productive.  We are already seeing urban areas re-dividing as forced school integration has turned public schools into black schools.  San Francisco, for example, has gone from a citywide population with 12% black to 4% black since the 1960’s and the public schools are now less than 10% white down from 55%.  Asians and Latinos are the rest of the non-black.

The same effect will be seen increasing in employment.  In commerce, as opposed to government, employment will see dis-ntegration as whites and other non-blacks are less and less willing to hire blacks for fear of workplace antagonism and discrimination lawsuits. This is the saddest outcome of ‘wokism.’

The same will be less true for women. The dis-integration is already happening and will accelerate as the influence of ‘wokism’ expands.  But women as a whole, excluding black women, will be able to create and operate businesses at a comparable rate to existing business formation.  Reproduction will suffer. But it is already declining at a rapid rate as the general social optimism is declining with the rise of ‘wokism.’

Lastly, the belief in human-caused global warming has never been strong in the general population and will be discarded step-by-step as ordinary people are expected to endure hardships or deprivations of any sorts caused by this woke thesis.

In summary, the ‘woke world’ is generally a dead-end with some bad outcomes for the black community.  America will survive because meritocracy and commerce are well embedded in the society and can not be fully suppressed.

Gays and Jobs

 

I tried leaving a comment to your blog posting "Gays and Jobs" but comments are closed. Here's what I wanted to leave:

 

You might be interested in John Waters' comments at the 50th anniversary of the Cockettes and Angels of Light:

 

https://diggers.org/angels_of_light_and_cockettes.htm#John_Waters

 

I agree that the gay liberation movement owes much to the hippies.

 

Salud,

 

Eric Noble

The Digger Archives

www.diggers.org

 

Me Alone. Why? Part 2

The question is why I have been able to see the sources of the modern world and why I find no one else has.  It is definitely not my IQ. 

I knew I was a Jew 

When I was 8 years old in El Paso, Texas, where my father was a prominent Liberal rabbi, several (3 or 4) Mexican boys chased me home from school throwing rocks because “the Jews killed Christ.”  They heard this from a ‘Hell-fire and Brimstone’ traveling Franciscan priest.  As a Jew, with a 3,000 year family history, I knew I was not run-of-the-mill.

I had been a Marxist 

I knew since age 11, when I got my Boy Scout troop to read Marx’s Communist Manifesto, that  I was very conscious of the ‘ruling class’ and paid attention to that idea.  

I saw the American hereditary elite fall apart in the early 1960’s, first hand, and was very aware of it.

Raw Data

The Hutchins-Adler Great Books program at the U. of Chicago taught me to always use original documents and data.

My experience on a Kibbutz

At age 19, I spent 3 months learning Hebrew in Israel on a Kibbutz in the Galilee.  Because I had previously read George Orwell’s Animal Farm I was able to see that in reality Marxism was mostly nonsense and that hierarchy was a human norm.

Self directed

For the rest of my life I never had a real boss, except for the few sergeants in my Army service. 

My first traditional job was starting the marketing research department at the Bank of America. I set my own agenda because nobody knew what marketing research was. The same was true at my next job at the Bank of California where I created MasterCard.

My third and last semi-job was as Treasurer and Business Manager for Glide Memorial Methodist Church where I set my own agenda and reported quarterly to a Board of changing members. 

Insatiable curiosity

From the first time I used a computer service in 1962 with punch cards for input and tiny hole-punched printouts, I have used the latest computer tech constantly for the rest of my life. I was always tech-savvy and even published my first book in 1974 on the ARPAnet at the Stanford SPIRES computer.

Saw the inside workings of 2,000 businesses

In 1974, after the publication of The Seven Laws of Money  I became the ‘Finance Guy’ to the Global hippy community.  I started the Briapatch small business community and subsequently consulted with over 2,000 businesses large (including Itochu, the largest business in the world at that time) and small.  I have probably consulted more businesses directly than any other human.

I also founded a business school in San Francisco,  called Noren that lasted 9 years. The Noren classes that I taught resulted in three business books including Marketing Without Advertising, the third most successful marketing book in English (excluding text books.)

San Francisco

Is where I lived continuously from age 21. I had lived there intermittently at earlier ages. Most people have no idea that San Francisco and environs are the source of a great deal (much) of the innovation in America in the arts, ideas and commerce. Ranging from major fashions and music over 150 years to the invention of television. Compiling such an history  would be an encyclopedic effort drawing from a vast body of literature. Someone someday will do it.

San Francisco is overflowing with talented and creative people.  The hippies were not exceptions in creating the greatest wave of innovation as the Baby Boomers from the 20th Century.  I did my part and wrote about the early wave of Baby Boomers from the Civil War who created the ‘Progressive Movement’  (Baby Boom 2) based in San Francisco.  The abundance of art at Burning Man is a testament to artistic richness that is overflowing.

Which gets to the next and last important point. 

Not New York

Many people believe that everything new and important ostensibly originates on the East Coast. Usually New York or Boston. However,  knowledgeable people recognize that this statement is false.  

A 1 ton gold meteorite could crash in downtown San Francisco and not make news.  The next day a 100-pound iron meteorite could land in Times Square and it would be headline news around the world.  News is always about New York, seldom about San Francisco.

I have actually seen this East Coast bias many times with my own eyes.  In 1991 a Korean bartender in a restaurant at 2nd and Geary in San Francisco figured that he could use a Japanese drink called shochu to make strong alcoholic drinks on his beer and wine license. Shochu is 2 to 4 times more alcoholic than beer or wine but is covered under the same license.  The Korean bartender started making shochu cocktails and the lines quickly wound out the door and up the block for his invention.  This invention, shochu cocktails on a beer and wine license, spread rapidly everywhere around the City.

By 1997 I saw the first article about the brilliant new invention of exciting cocktails invented in New York and rapidly proliferating with a shochu base.

Unless my ashes are scattered in New York, my work may never be discovered.

Me Alone, Why? Part 1

I think I am alone in understanding the creation of the modern world. 

Many people have done a good job in looking at the elements and the significance of separate historic developments. I include Niall Ferguson, Jonathan Israel and Matt Ridley among those who have done the best job.  There are many others who have contributed to our understanding.   Many have seen the central importance of empirical thinking, reading, writing and the legal underlay; and many have seen the significance of the sequence of innovation from wind power, water power, steam power to oil power.

But I seem to be unique in seeing the stifling impact of hereditary elites.  Only in the right circumstances of a diverse urban population with strong social networks, laws and a culture of tolerating innovation can the absence of an hereditary elite allow modern commerce to thrive.  

We didn’t get modern commerce in China which had all the other scientific, intellectual, urban, and diversity ingredients but also had the stifling hereditary ruling elite.  Nor did we get it in the culturally homogeneous Arab, Indian or Latin societies with weak elites.  Tribes had to be largely dissolved, as well, as in Britain, France and Northern Europe.

Modern commerce grew first in the British Empire where the hereditary elite and primogenitor were disrupted in overseas dominions and most importantly in the United States of America where diverse immigration was extensive, and the wide open ‘West’ made it possible for the younger sons to escape the thwarting influence of the elite East coast families. 

Hereditary elites stifle all innovation to preserve their power.  Only in Japan was the hereditary elite able to absorb innovative individuals without totally stifling it; but there was a lack of cultural diversity needed to create modern commerce.

Why am I unique in seeing the whole picture? There are definitely many people smarter than I.

For me to understand my own functions I have had to discover several general human attributes.

The three most important attributes we homos have are (1) adulthood, (2) culture and (3) brain limitations.

I stumbled on the first, ‘adulthood’ entirely by accident.  My girlfriend had an affair with Lyall Watson a few years after we broke up. She introduced him to me. He told me about the 100th monkey story and I interpreted it to mean that only in the juvenile stage of animal development is learning possible. For humans, I calculated that the juvenile stage ends before age 23. New original learning and genuinely new thinking does not occur in most humans after age 23.  From a cursory survey of my friends, I guess that exceptions occur in about 1 out of 300 cases.  

In my case I became part of the 1 in 300 because I went to Israel at age 19, lived on a kibbutz and had my entire worldview totally overthrown by that experience.  The juvenile door for learning remained open.

(2) Culture is another fortuitous experience.  At age 32, I took a trip around the world as my own prerequisite to joining the board of Point Foundation. Dick Baker Roshi, who had spent 3 years living in Japan, did a little to prepare me.  When I got there I only saw the Japanese as small Americans who worked harder than Americans and did many things a little differently.  But it was different enough for me to begin to see what culture was. (‘Culture’ as anthropologists see it.) I resolved to pick a culture and study it.  I picked Japan as a comfortable place to study; I liked Japanese food, cleanliness and its long isolated history. I visited Japan every year for the next 50 years, staying from one month to  three months.  I traveled the country and became involved in business, politics and the arts.

Lastly, (3) brain limitations.  I have long thought about the human brain capacity.  Kinsey said that he started teaching knowing the names of 30,000 moth species.  Each time he learned a new student's name he forgot one moth species.  That started me thinking about the brain.  The largest functioning word memory is about 100,000 words.  I concluded that the human brain, in computer terms, can only contain a few million bytes of information, much of it compressed for fairly fast retrieval. 

I concluded that most of our intelligence resides in the many knowledgeable friends we have. We store knowledge and information with each other.   I have had many brilliant and diverse friends which has been my source for a broad worldview. 

Grandfather of Burning Man

In January of 1978 Carole Rae and I were driving in San Francisco.  Carole wondered why something wasn’t being done about all the dead Christmas trees on the street corners.

I suggested we rent a large moving van, fill it with dead trees and burn them at Ocean Beach.

The next Saturday,  Carole phoned our friends and invited them to the beach burn. My mother and one of my children filled up the rented truck with over 40 dead Christmas trees.

At the beach that night, there were 200 people, who unloaded the truck and built a pile of trees about 15 feet high.  Somebody lit it and the flames were over 40 feet high. The crowd went wild, dancing around the fire and running into the ocean.

We did it for a second and third year.  The second year the Park Service Police were standing next to the truck and gave me a $15 ticket for an unpermitted beach fire.

One of the attendees, a lawyer, Gary Near, demanded that I protest the ticket with his help.  We did and the judge waived the fine but demanded that I not do it again.

I did it one more year but hid the truck immediately after unloading it.  From that date on, San Franciscans have been burning their own family trees at the beach in January.

I may have gotten the idea for the tree burning from seeing a 30 foot high pole in a clearing in the forest near Kyoto during the Summer Obon Festival. The event had pine shavings on top of the pole which were lit by an arrow.  The shavings fell off the platform like a burning waterfall.

One of my close friends, John Law, created his own version of my burn at the nearby China Beach. The overlap in people was largely the Cacaphony Society (Suicide Club at the time).  John built The Man at the top out of neon; John’s profession is neon signs. Years later after again being banned, the fire was moved by John and Larry Harvey to the Nevada Desert for an August event known as Burning Man.  

John has always given me credit for the event, as its grandfather. In many ways I am the grandfather to countless events in the San Francisco Bay area because the area is so fecund with artists, crazies and original people who only need a suggestion to do something original.

I Understand the Rejection of the Modern World

I was sitting with my first cousin and her Arab husband, smoking his hand rolled cigarettes and drinking his Turkish coffee while watching two of his grandchildren running around having raucous fun.

He lamented life in the US. without a big family and the wonderful feeling of being surrounded by family members all the time. When he visits his Arab family back home he always stays for a month and enjoys giant family meals with dozens of cousins and dancing and singing nearly every night.

Family life and tribal membership is something that we Westerners don’t understand.

I’ve traveled the world and found that a big family and being part of a tribe is the greatest feeling of comfort that can be found among several billions of people.  I’ve heard this from an Oxford educated Indian in New Delhi, from a Harvard educated woman in Mali, in Guatemala and dozens of other times.

I tried to start a global organization in 1992 to help Western people understand that our efforts to modernize most of the world is not appreciated or welcomed.  I failed miserably. Couldn’t find even a few Western people who agreed with me.

I had an Egyptian immigrant explain to me the day after the 9/11 twin towers slaughter that it was done to tell Americans to stop destroying traditional societies.

Almost no one understands the following fortuitous sources of the Modern World that non-moderns find so distressing.  

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Humans are not as smart as many animals. But humans can communicate by voice over a large range of subjects.  This facility may only have existed for a few tens of thousands of years but it allowed for extensive social organizing.  Humans learned to write and read only a few millennia ago and only in places like China, Babylon, Greece, Japan, Egypt, Persia, India, Israel and a few other places. Many of these places developed schools to transmit the written material.

All the societies that had writing and reading also had hereditary elites that suppressed innovation.  The exception was the Jews.

In 100 BCE the Roman Army attacked and dispersed the Jews, who had writing and reading. The dispersed Jews then developed small surviving clusters of Jews centered around a rabbi who created schools to debate their inherited writing. The debate focused on the writing in order for it to conform to reality. (The records of the debates are called Talmud.) These hundreds of clusters of Jews had teachers as leaders not an hereditary elite.

This dispersed but connected society was the first worldwide network of readers and debaters. They stayed in touch with each other.

By 1500 the Spanish and Portuguese dispersed the Jews again. Many went to Holland, the first neo-democracy in the modern world with a very egalitarian population; at the same time that book printing expanded in Europe and the Catholic Church order of Jesuits started studying Hebrew and the Talmud.

This European locale was the source of science and empirical study. It was the core of modernity.  It challenged mysticism, tribalism, miracles and alchemy.

The final touchstone of the Modern World was the creation of the United States of America, with its vast open West, diverse immigrant population and a weak hereditary elite.  All the ingredients that created the modern world after the Civil War.

People who hate their lives and the modern world, often blame the Jews.  Which is historically accurate. The Roman Army and the Spanish Inquisition deserve some credit too.

I Told You So

Just today it has become evident that the giant U.S. tech companies that have made much of America so rich have shot themselves in the foot.

Google, Microsoft, and a few other international tech and accounting giants have seen gross revenue and profits decline and have shown a steady decline in the past two quarters.

 

I warned in April that having U.S  companies abruptly pull out of Russia would have terrible consequences for all major American companies because most of the world will realize that American corporations are not reliable entities to buy from.  Future repair and updates will always be in jeopardy, based on the fickle behavior of the American government.

 

I also warned that longer-term Indian, Chinese, Russian and other technically competent nations will fill the void with their own products and services.

 

Sad the level of malice and stupidity that pervades our ‘woke’ society.