Pro Commerce

Polls were wrong

On Wednesday the 3rd, our too smart- too arrogant media will be asking why ‘the polls were wrong’. Let me approach the question honestly. I am a professional in the field. I’ve worked in the field for forty years and been an expert witness on survey research for over twenty years.

The theory of survey sampling is based on a mathematically perfect random selection from the universe of interest to the survey researcher. The mathematical proof of the validity of random sampling is simple and unquestionable.

In the case of polling, the universe to be sampled is all people who will vote in an election. Right off the bat you have a problem since this universe is roughly half of all people you could interview and the people you interview (a sample of the wrong universe) will not tell you the truth about whether they are even registered to vote. Got it?

Now add a few more problems. Only a tiny percent of the perfect sample are willing to be interviewed these days; maybe 5%. That really screws up the mathematics of sampling, making it irrelevant.

Recently, the use of cell phones has created two effects. One effect the media has noticed: about 6% of the population doesn’t have telephones with regular landlines. The media has not notice the second effect: everyone with a cell phone (more than half of the population) uses his or her landline differently these days. Most cell phone owners have a tape machine and they are much less likely to answer the phone live, than ever before.

Regardless of the radical change in the chance to get a reliable sample, survey researchers have always tried to correct for the changes with demographic correlates. (What you mean, Michael? ) If the final survey yields 40% women and 55% men and 5% refuse to answer, then the results are weighted so that the women get slightly more than a weight of 1 and the men get slightly less than a weight of 1. The same for other standard demographics, age, education and geographic location.

At this point, the weighting is a mess because people really lie about age and education. Worse, age and education are weaker and weaker correlates to voting habits than ever before. Urban older males are now the most volatile voting group and they are impossible to detect. Women and young people are shifting their allegiances.

Why do you know the polls are wrong? Because I looked at the 2002 Congressional polls and the 2003 California Recall polls and they were far off the final results. Far off in underestimating the volatile Independent vote. The only close poll in 2002 Congressional race was the CNN/USA/Gallup poll; it underestimated the Republican victory by much less than the other polls. So far in 2004, the CNN/USA/Gallop poll has been far to the Bush side by half a dozen points for this whole election run-up. Very different from the other widely oscillating polls. That is proof that the polls are wrong.

So what can we say about why the polls are wrong? Unfortunately we don’t have the material at hand to know what is specifically wrong. See the blog below to learn how we could get a good answer.

National Unity Poll

I call the solution to wrong political polls the National Unity Poll but that is a facetious name. The correct name would be National Base Survey. Let me explain.

Way, way back in history, 1965, I was a hot figure in marketing research and very active in the survey research field. Being Righteous Michael, I was offended by all the straw polls taken in Iowa barbershops that were treated as legitimate polls and considered by the press to be the equivalent of more reliable random sample polls.

So I solved my problem by writing up a professional ethics statement for survey researchers and went to San Diego and got my statement passed by the Pacific Chapter of the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers PAAPOR, of which I was an active and influential member. Within a year and a half the national AAPOR adopted my statement of professional ethics. My ethics required professionals to publish their questionnaires, sample size and survey methodology.

At that point, I started a series of classes for journalists to help them understand survey research sampling and help them tell the difference between junk and decent polling.

It all worked as I had planned. I was young and able to move mountains easily.

Today, political polls are just as wrong as straw polls were forty years ago, for different reasons, but the solution to the problem is different. I am older, old people can rarely move mountains and I have no influence in the survey research field.

The solution we need is a national survey, face to face, with a very high completed-interview rate, maybe 90% completed interviews. Such a survey would be done every five years. It would ask a range of questions that could serve as a base for corporate marketing research as well as public opinion polling and would connect to Census data as well.

The National Base survey would be used to make more reliable weighting corrections in the cheap ongoing surveys that we see every day in political polls. Correct weighting would solve the current wrong polls problem.

Such a survey would be very expensive, over $5 million each time it is done.

I could get AAPOR to pay for such a survey if I were young, interested and active. I’m not.

So in lieu, a few members of Congress should start a bill along the same lines with the Bureau of Labor Statistics doing the job. To keep the government out of corporate surveying, AAPOR would quickly do the job themselves.

I call such a poll a National Unity Poll out of irony. The irony is that such a national base poll could not be done today by AAPOR because they are a chaotic bunch of stray cats that cannot agree on anything.

Anger vs. guilt

Every thinker I know is trying to figure out the Bush hate, hatred of the Bush haters, and high voter turnout that engulf us.

I think the division we see in America started to happen in the week of September 12 to September 20 in 2001.

Americans ended up dealing with the suicidal Arab attack on America by either being angry and deciding America must fight back, in line with our heroic Viking tradition, or that we were guilty of something that caused the Arabs to attack us. Guilt translates into the belief that we were being punished.

The guilty Americans have several camps, but they all believe America was the provocateur that brought disaster upon ourselves.

One guilt camp believes that American foreign policy, for decades, must have been so heinous that it provoked the Arab attack. Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky are the most outspoken critics who belong to that camp.

Another guilt camp believes that America is a fallen nation -- fallen into sin. Pat Robertson was prominent in this camp; he believes we have fallen and are being punished by God for our rampant homosexuality and sinful abortions.

Other camps are variations on these two themes. Claims of American arrogance are widespread, with evidence offered in the statement that all the people in the world now hate us. The guilt takes many forms, often personal; the guilt is always directed in the form of hatred toward President Bush.

I have long assumed that the hate Bush and the hatred of Bush haters were tied to some deeply buried emotion. I now think it is tied to individual reaction to the Arab attack on America. We reacted either with anger or guilt. President Bush has become the vehicle for expressing our profound emotions on this historic event. Bush is patriot or tyrant.

He lost it

I wrote about the San Francisco hotel strike and lockout in a blog in early October when the strike started. This is an update.

When the two-week strike was over, the lockout continued as I explained that it would. It is profitable for the hotels to work with a skeleton crew during the nearly vacant months of Nov-May when room occupancy is usually under 50%.

The mayor’s office in San Francisco has a long history of being a mediator in local strikes. Mayor Alioto and Mayor Willie Brown were particularly good mediators.

Our current mayor, Gavin Newsom, decided to intercede as a mediator. He was in a perfect position; he took campaign money and support from both sides of the strike-lockout.

Instead the mayor sent both sides a letter giving them 24 hours to go back to work and start mediating during a 90-day “cooling off” period. The unions said, "Great" -- they need their jobs. The hotels said, "Hell no, we are making money keeping these ingrates on the street."

The Mayor lost his cool. The hotels ignored his demand, so he lost it. He joined the union picket line and made an outrageous public attack on the hotels saying that the city would never again use the fourteen locked out hotels.

The attack was pathetic because the City doesn’t use hotels; it only gets tax revenue from the hotels. It gets $150 million a year in hotel surtax. It is possible that a few top City employees have affairs with their staff in the big hotels, but illict City Hall affairs aren’t a major money stream for the hotels.

Now the Mayor is recognized as an inept wimp.

The union workers are the real losers. Most workers will never get their jobs back, and the ones who do it will be working under the worst conditions.

The current Lefty-mandated San Francisco minimum wage of $9.50 per hour, starting January 1, probably plays a role in this mess, but I don't know yet how it plays a role.

Death of Arafat

At this writing, I don’t know when Arafat will die. I do know that as national monsters go, Arafat is somewhere between Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Milosevic. All these monsters are alive. Castro has kept his fellow Cubans in near starvation poverty for four decades out of ego and ideology. Saddam Hussein murdered his own people and, like Milosevic, murdered many of his neighbors. Ditto Arafat.

Like Saddam Hussein, Arafat has always lied about everything. (Lying seems to be a common thread among Arab leaders. Some of my friends argue Arab leaders have no idea what the Western concept of “lying” is, in the first place.)

The death of Arafat will be a time of great revelation. We will get to see what Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and the entire leadership of France and the EU have to say about this horrible monster. They have all supported him in his death cult.

For me, Arafat is a symbol of historic change, more significant than the Holocaust. The Holocaust showed how much all Europeans hated Jews. The hatred was pan-European regardless of the Jews' contribution to European society or their level of assimilation.

Some Holocaust guilt on the part of a few Europeans, but mostly American Holocaust guilt at the cabinet level, created the tiny unsustainable State of Israel. That half-hearted creation is the only positive reaction to the Holocaust that I see.

Arafat, four decades later, showed that killing Jews is not an unacceptable thing to do. Many, if not most, Europeans still hate Jews enough to monetarily support Arafat in his Jew killing efforts.

The people whom Arafat has been killing turn out not to be Jews, but Israelis. Therein lies a very important difference that I discuss in the blog below.

The historic change

My observations and experiences during my April-May trip to Israel continue to stimulate my mind.

What I call the Holocaust In Slow Motion, the daily killing of Israeli civilians over a four year period (1999-2004), had a profound effect on Israelis and subsequently on me.

I’m sure that several academics are writing 600 page books on this subject. I’m a thinker with no academic pretense, so I’ll explain what I see as the converging realities and the discarded realities as presented in concentrated form in Israel.

Commerce meets tit-for-tat.

The big converging reality is the triumph of modernity and commerce. This triumph is well described in Daniel Yergin’s Commanding Heights. The end of the Cold War and ten years of uninterrupted American economic and productivity growth at historically high levels were overwhelming forces as we entered the 21st Century.

When Israelis recently awoke from the Jews in Diaspora experience (I’ll get to that in a moment) they found the reality around them was the triumph of commerce. Israelis have almost totally accepted that as their new reality and discarded the old socialist order that had been the foundation of the State of Israel.

Tit-for-tat is an absurdly simple, but profoundly important discovery. Game theory, using computer simulation, found to a high level of certainty something philosophy hadn’t noticed in three thousand years, or that philosophy got wrong: tit-for-tat.

Tit-for-tat is the observation that the best way to interact with other human beings in nearly all situations is to treat them kindly until they first abuse you, then you immediately abuse them back until they change their behavior and revert to kindness, if they ever do revert. This is true for individuals and may be true for states.

Jews have been an oppressed minority for several thousand years and they have generally been abused. Jews never got much chance to learn tit-for-tat theory because it only applies when the other party cannot or will not totally wipe you out.

So Jews developed and supported many modern institutions that protect minorities, in an effort to create protections for themselves. Jews helped create minority-protecting institutions such as democracy, rule of law, rational and scientific thinking, notions of universal human rights, socialism and unions. Jews also tried to make themselves valuable to their majority dominators in the fields of medicine and banking.

When Jews became Israelis they promptly realized that cowardice and servility only got them killed in their 8th Century Arab neighborhood.

Some Israelis tried to bring their Arab neighbors into the 20th Century using the same principles: democracy, rule of law, rational and scientific thinking, notions of universal human rights, socialism and unions. Need I say it didn’t work?

Many other Israelis intuitively became strong, forceful, forthright and powerful. They created the most powerful and effective army on the planet. They demonstrated their military and technical power twice by defeating the Arab neighbors who were five times their size. (Of course anti-Semitism has not abated in the slightest as the cowardly Jews became mighty Israelis).

After forty years of slow movement from the Diaspora Jewish views of great thinkers like Martin Buber, Israel slowly moved toward the stronger tit-for-tat position of a forceful State.

When Arafat and the Palestinians brought Israelis the Holocaust in Slow Motion, 1999-2004, Israelis woke up from the millennia of Jewish Diaspora servility. Israelis awoke as a whole people and opened their eyes to the emerging world of commerce and the need for pure tit-for-tat behavior.

Today Israelis, and me, are challenging all the ideas and institutions that they (we) had relied on in Diaspora. Socialism and unions are clearly passé. Universal human rights have been aggressively used against Israelis, they probably should be discarded or radically altered.

Democracy and the rule of law are up for re-examination. Democracy, for a country under life threatening siege, may not work. Israel’s first great contribution to democracy under siege has been the invention of unity government. Rule of Law? The Israeli Supreme Court is tempting that core value every time they tell the military to move the security wall for the benefit of Arabs.

Only rational thought and science have survived the Arab onslaught. Now Israelis have to find out more about creating a rational (non-ideological) society.

Creating a rational society in the age of commerce is a subject the world has only toyed with in the past. It is time to take the subject seriously.

Pathos or new insights

There is a new television program where two groups of bariatric (extremely obese) people compete to lose weight.
This is generally a pathetic piece of theatre because a reasonable percentage of people can’t lose much weight, regardless of the incentives, as the Dr. Phil show clearly demonstrated. The rest, who can lose weight through hard work and strong determination, are doomed to regain the weight in one to three years. The regaining of weight occurs in better than 95% of all weight loss cases.

The positive aspect of this program, if the message ever gets through to the public (most scientist are too socially incompetent to even notice what is happening), is that once you put on weight you can’t get it off.

Maybe a generation will grow up knowing that you can’t lose weight so you better not put it on in the first place.

I learned this from my scientist daughter who may be the only socially competent person in the world of science.

Not jobs

In the late 70s and early 80s I spent time in Sweden helping create thousands of small businesses based on my Briarpatch experience. I also spent time in Western England (Portsmouth area) and Lyon, France.

The Swedes were interested in creating small business because they understood that small business was the key to success in exporting. The French considered small business as a theoretically necessary step in creating new technology businesses. I was asked to lecture at a business school that was adjacent to a technical school.

The English kept asking me to create jobs. I said I didn’t know how to do that. I couldn’t create businesses for the purpose of creating jobs. Businesses are created for a wide variety of reasons, often because the creators hate their salaried jobs.

The table above (click to enlarge) relates directly to that issue. In the past four years, beginning just as Clinton left office, the U.S. rapidly lost 2.5 million salaried jobs and is rapidly creating new payroll jobs to replace the old ones.

Exactly one year into the job decline, Americans took themselves out of the labor market and two million people began working for themselves. We don’t know what kind of work they started doing, but it wasn’t a payroll job.

I presume that people who say they are working (they show up in the Household Survey), but don’t have W-2 income (Payroll Survey) are now self-employed. Some are probably consultants, others make a living selling on eBay and still others have small businesses that employ salaried workers.

Congratulations to our 2 million Americans who left the job market to work for themselves. You are part of modern commerce, my heroes.

S.F. Police

Some inside gossip from the S.F. Police.

San Francisco has a problem with its police. The police are constantly being abused and insulted by public figures. The City has been telling the police to be more involved in buggery -- basically to fuck themselves. The Board of Supervisors seems to say it once a month and the Mayor seldom misses a chance to say it. (This is the same mayor who yesterday told the hotel owners, who are locking out a suicidal union, to take back their employees now, with no conditions.) Mayor Newsom thinks he is President Carter telling the Israelis to accept whatever nonsense he wants them to accept. (Carter forced Israel to take Gaza in the Egyptian pseudo-peace settlement.)

As a consequence the S.F. Police have very little interest in their jobs or protecting San Franciscans. The police usually order a couple more coffee and donuts before responding to an urgent call from any gang related neighborhood.

One source of police distress is the Office of Citizen Complaints. It’s both good and bad to have many complaints filed against you if you are a cop. Bad, because the OCC harasses you. Good because of the following weirdness.

The Public Defenders Office has made it a policy to have every defendant they deal with file a complaint about the cop or cops who arrested them. The PD then uses the complaint in the trial when the cops testify.

The consequence is that the cops who do the most arrests have the most complaints against them. Many complaints mean a police person is honored among cops, abused by the OCC.

--------also--------

Turns out the new District Attorney, Kamala Harris is not as hated as her eight year predecessor, K.O. Hallinan. The reason is simple. Kamala, Lefty Fundamentalist that she is, doesn’t come to work drunk every day and manages her staff. When a deputy DA is supposed to be in court, the deputy DA is in court. That was seldom true under her predecessor, Hallinan.

Things were so bad before that S.F. cops who were tailing a particularly bad guy always arranged to have him arrested in some other jurisdiction. That way the bad guy would be tried in San Mateo County, Los Angeles or by the Feds. Catching and booking a bad guy in San Francisco often resulted in the bad guy walking because the DA was so unreliable and incompetent he might not have anyone at the preliminary hearing or the bail hearing.

Lemony Snicket

Have you missed the hottest thing for kids since they started hauling around 900 page books by JK Rowling?

A San Francisco writer, Daniel Handler, who went to Lowell High School the year after my youngest daughter, has become a celebrity. Handler has a movie coming out in two months based on the characters in his children’s book series (13 books) written in the pen name Lemony Snicket.

The back cover of Book One has the following: “I’m sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children…”

Handler treats his young readers as intelligent. Here he is describing the three Baudelaire children: “…their parents gave them permission to take a rickety trolley – the word “rickety,” you probably know, here means “unsteady” or “likely to collapse” – alone to the seashore, ...”

To me the most amazing and interesting element of the Lemony Snicket series is the bad guy, Uncle Olaf. Uncle Olaf is tall, skinny, mean as hell, a theatrical person, but most importantly, he is dirty. His house is a pigsty.

Uncle Olaf is the first bad guy I can remember reading about or seeing in fiction who was dirty. Is this something new in American iconography? Dirty versus good?

Woody Allen, nu?

In mid-August I wrote a blog about ethnic voters, Jews and Blacks, moving to support Bush. G.W. Bush is a president who has been directly supportive of both groups for strongly moral reasons. At the time I wrote the blog, polls had only shown a movement from 20% Jews for Bush to 40%. Blacks have since shown an identical doubling from 10% for Bush to 20%.

So both groups have the same level of sensitivity to a president who strongly supports them.

My remaining question is, “Why are Jews so slow to see the first powerful figure in history to openly support them?”

I can only speculate on the reasons by looking around at my Jewish friends who blithely ignore the issue of appreciating a president who publicly helps them.

The unappreciative friends of mine, including a few relatives, who don’t recognize what President Bush has done for Israel and Jews, fall into two general categories. Those who don’t know what’s happening in the world and those who identify with Woody Allen. The first group is just the way they are. No need to understand or explain.

As for the second group, you need to know that Woody Allen portrays a schlemiel in his movies. Woody Allen is a schlemiel. You may also need to know that schlemiel is a Yiddish word for a cowardly person who gets kicked around by everyone and seems to take pride in his lowly status. Jews have been largely forced into the role of schlemiel for 2,000 difficult years.

American schlemiel Jews: Think about the way Africans react to African-Americans: “They still act like slaves.” Israelis react the same way to American Jews: “They are cowards, afraid of their shadows.”

I suspect that the schlemiels who make up a large part of American Jewry look at President Bush and wonder: “Who can this person be who is not kicking us around? He must be kicking us around, I just can’t see it.”

Suicidal Left

The Left has always been fratricidal. It came as no surprise, while talking to a staff member of the Pacifica Radio Network (the most Lefty radio network outside of Cuba) when I was told about the endless fights over Political Correctness at the Network and at the stations.

What did surprise me was the imaginative term he used to describe his unyielding, uncompromising opponents: the suicidal left.

The ineffectiveness of Palestinian suicide bombers seems to be sinking into the consciousness of the Left.

Science quiz

The photo on the right was taken with a cheap digital camera from my car while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge at the speed limit--45 mph. What happened to create this photo?

Answer: This speed seems to parallel the CCD filling in the image. The line scans on the CCD (image receiver in the camera) must be about the same rate as the 45 mph auto. The top lines are scanned first when the pedestrian's heads were adjacent to the car, and the bottom lines are scanned last when the pedestrian's feet were at the back of the image. Anyway, that's my explanation.

Why environmentalism died

In a recent discussion I was told how bad an environmental president George W. Bush is. I pointed out that he never got any environmental legislation to sign. The reason he never got any environmental legislation is because the environmental movement has not inspired Congress.

I know why the environmental movement failed to inspire Congress. Because environmentalism has a poorly conceived vision of an environmentally sound world and is fraught with dishonesty.

The blog below describes an article I wrote in 1979 pointing out that large cities are the viable environmental vision. Environmentalism has totally ignored the large city vision and settled for a sentimental and melancholy rural vision of an environmental future. Think Ecotopia, the main environmental vision created and published by my good friend Chick Callenbach.

I wrote an article, long ago, showing the data to support three large cities, in a variety of climates and geological settings, no city exceeding Los Angeles in size (acreage), as a sound and logical environmental vision.

Three such cities could be home to all the human beings on the planet, each with the same or greater living space than they have now. The rest of the planet would be an uninhabited park except for the American and Canadian farmland, which could supply everyone with plenty of food.

Such a vision is sound and logical; it would have large parks and efficient transportation and work. What it wouldn’t have is stand alone houses with a backyard or the equivalent.

Nobody would publish my article and the subject has never been broached to my knowledge. My vision (ignoring the governance of such multi-culture cities), is a more coherent environmental vision and could be accepted by a far greater base of the worlds peoples.

At the same time a rational vision has been ignored, the environmental community has thrived on three lies. None of which has been openly discussed among environmentalists. First, population Armageddon, which disappeared as a reality in 1994, when I wrote about it. Second, Global warming, for which the continual increase in contradictory evidence is growing and ignored. Third the Kyoto Treaty which was rejected by the United States because it didn’t include functional emission trading credits which is the only environmental control that has been shown to work.

A wrongheaded, illogical, rural vision of the environment and a pattern of head-in-the-sand public posture is the sure route to movement failure.

Hippies for commerce

My friend Rasberry, longtime co-author, and the original hippy, lives among hundreds of surviving hippies in Sonoma County.

Rasberry reports that many of her pals are deeply unhappy with the world because they have bought into Lefty Fundamental Armageddonism. Rasberry feels there must be some way to help hippies and former hippies to understand that the world of commerce and modernity has delivered many of the qualities that (we) hippies dreamed of.

I’ll briefly list the elements of the hippie dream and compare them to the current world of commerce.

Hippy dreams: a daily life of fun, theater and excitement; a world of equality, where people dealt directly with each other as equals in an open caring way; a world where there were no secrets, problems were solved on a direct person to person basis. The hippy dream world had much self-administered health care, good environmental practices including foods and large intimate communities with open and accepting sexuality.

Have I left anything major out of the dream? Obviously, I left out music and drugs. Clearly we still have plenty of music and drugs. Marijuana is now de facto legal in California and a few other places.

Rasberry is right. We have moved a long way in the hippy direction. The definition of the modern world of commerce is: great autonomy for individuals and freedom of self-expression. Commerce is pro-merit and anti-heirarchy.

I think that modernity has created and continues to create a stunning open space for fun, creativity and any social structures that spontaneous people want to create: think performance art, which is everywhere, think flash crowds and think about Burning Man and the hundreds of ongoing year-round Burning Man offspring.

We have Whole Foods and organic foods are now 20% of the retail food market. Kaiser and most HMOs include acupuncture, bodywork and many holistic practices. Mediation is the most common form of dispute resolution, far exceeding the use of courts on a neighborhood and local level.

Salli and I live happy, fulfilling and exciting lives. We are nothing special and we don’t get government money nor did either of us get a large inheritance. Virtually everything we hippies wanted is here and virtually nothing restrains us from creating the kinds of communities we want.

We just no longer are sure we want to live in close intimate communities after we tried it a few decades ago.

I'm with Rasberry. Most of the hippy dream is here. How do we let the hippy world know this so they can be free of their sorrow and dread?

Delayed gratification

Two emails came this week to let me know about some work I did more than twenty-five years ago.

The first told me about a profile of Mark Liebman, CEO of Pictopia, a successful online commercial photo business. The article was in the 10/8 issue of the San Francisco Business Times. Liebman says, in the article, that his favorite book is The Seven Laws of Money. I wrote that in 1973 with Salli Rasberry. It was re-issued in the early 1990s as a classic edition by Shambhala Press. Thanks Mark.

No other book written since then has covered the same material, sad to say.

Rasberry and I looked in the Library of Congress in Spring of 1974 to see if the title The Seven Laws ….was on any other books; it wasn’t. Since 1974, more than 160,000 books have been written with a title that includes The Seven Laws of, according to an Amazon.com search.

My father, now gone, used to insult the memory of William Randolph Hearst by saying that regardless of his power, wealth and newspaper empire Hearst never contributed a word to the English language. Dad, does my book title count?

The other email told me about an article in the latest New Yorker by David Owen called Green Manhattan. Owen writes a good article and the New Yorker has made a major contribution to environmentalism by publishing this article (readers of my blog know I think of the New Yorker as reading matter for the nattering nabobs of the Upper West Side of Manhattan).

Owen explains how a dense city, especially one like New York, is a masterpiece of environmentally intelligent living. Owen quotes an article I wrote in 1979 and published in the CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980. I pointed out, and gave data showing, that a person living in a house in a suburb uses five times as much energy and material resources as a person living in a city. Owen expands on my article.

My article shows a co-author, Bob Gnaizda, we’ll come to that matter later.

There have been no articles since 1980 that make the point I did, until Owen came along. However the article had a significant effect, publicly acknowledged, by several of the leading architects and planners who founded the New Urbanism movement.

My final comment on both of these tributes at my mid-life (I don’t think that much of what I’ve written will be noticed unless I live three more decades), is that the friends I worked with on these two projects, Salli Rasberry and Bob Gnaizda, are still my closest friends.

Commerce solves problems

In San Francisco, building a house on an empty lot usually takes two years to go through the zoning approval process. It can be an additional year if the neighbors are well organized against it.

The demand for more housing is great here and the price of houses is high. The house in the photo, two bedrooms, before renovation would sell for $1.2 million. A two-year delay in the zoning process, along with hiring an architect and lawyer to fight for the zoning approval can be expensive and risky.

Commerce has solved the problem. Much new construction is now in the form of raising existing housing. This is what you see in the photo. The house is on a hillside and has been raised one story, which will add about 1,000 sq. ft of new living space, provide a better view on the top two floors plus adding a new two-car garage.

The zoning approval will take only a few months, for a house raising, because the neighbors have no legal nor significant complaints. The house will still be under the height limit of 40 feet from the highest point on the lot and the footprint of the house will not change.

The cost of jacking up the house is only about $15,000. The major costs of this type renovation are in the reinstallation of utilities, a new foundation, building-out the 1,000 sq. ft. of new floor space and adding the garage.

Al Sharpton Prize

Does Samantha Powers deserve the Al Sharpton Buffoon Prize?

Samantha Powers, a professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights, wrote a book that was published last year on the long history of American inaction in genocide.

Ms Powers wrote a very long piece in last week’s New Yorker on the current long running genocide in Sudan. She gives page after page of graphic description of atrocities that the janjaweed have perpetrated in Darfur.

Ms. Powers is that strange public critic who demands that America take action to stop genocide but she is opposed to war and publicly opposed the American led regime change in Iraq.

In the New Yorker article Ms. Powers strange logic becomes more visible when she criticizes the French and the Germans for taking no action in the Sudan. In fact France and Germany have actively stood in the way of the positive actions the U.S. has been taking since 1996. Ms Powers reasoning is that the U.S. lost influence over the French and Germans because of the invasion in Iraq. Now we can’t get France and Germany to act against genocide in Sudan.

The problem with her logic is reality. The French and the Germans took no action to stop the genocide in Yugoslavia 14 years earlier either. Stopping the Yugoslavian genocide required the United States to take military action and the U.S. pressured the French and Germans to help (in their own backyard).

Ms. Powers seems to think that genocide can be stopped with a few strong letters to the offending government ….at most what is needed is a mild boycott of arms.

This strange view of the world is what, I suggest, wins Ms Powers the Al Sharpton Buffoon Prize.

The prize is named after Rev. Al Sharpton for his great achievements in self-promotion, for being a person showing no visible competence, and for being a person with the moral authority of a rabid pit bull. Sharpton’s power of logic are also noticable. This list of Sharpton's achievements may be considered his positive traits; his outstanding negative trait is that his dancing on TV that reminds many of us of Stepin-fetch-it, a very decent man, a black performer who, seventy years ago, took the only theatrical jobs available, at the time, for blacks.

In the article on genocide in the Sudan, in the New Yorker, Ms Powers does a strange thing independent of her pleading for an end to state sponsored genocide while opposing military force. Powers appears to rank atrocities in order from the worst, gang rape, to the second worst, individual rape of an attractive young woman, to cutting off hands and arms of men, to physical torture of men and finally the least offensive to her seems to be murder of a male.

I don’t know what award to give Ms Powers for this strange ranking of atrocities, possibly a literary award since rape may be more interesting to her readers than a shot in the head.

Election prediction

One of my blog readers wants to know if I am still projecting a Bush victory next month.

I am projecting a landslide victory for President Bush. Headlines: Bush Landslide.

There are two pieces of evidence. The old evidence is the error and direction of error in the 2002 Senate election and the California recall election of 2003. In both of those races the polls were way off, and off in favor of the losing Democrats.

The new evidence is Australia. Polls tend to be more accurate in Australia because of compulsory voting which reduces error due to estimating which poll respondent will vote. The Australian polls had Howard leading Latham by one point for months and weeks before the election. Howard, the Conservative won by 52.5% to 47% and carried more new seats in his Parliament.

There is one old political adage that has been right in California since 1952 when it was first apparent. An incumbent never loses if his approval rate remains at or above 45%. President Bush has never dropped below 47% approval rate.

Debt and deficit

One of my blog readers asked me to write about concerns raised in a PBS program about the potential for the federal debt to be a future problem with baby boomers.

In graduate school I trained as an economist, but I have avoided the field ever since. One important lesson that economics figured out (I say figured out because no historic economist ever wrote about it) is the lesson that a government cannot save. It can borrow, but it can’t put aside a surplus of revenue over expenses and invest that money. Federal governments, because they create the money supply, are always on a cash basis.

If the revenue to the government is less that its expenditures, the government borrows by issuing bonds. Bonds are issued for periods from a few days up to thirty years in length. Bonds are continually maturing and new bonds are issued to replace the maturing bonds. If the government has an excess of revenues, it issues fewer new bonds in the continually recycling bond market. If the government has an excess of expenses, it creates more new bonds.

The bond market is a transfer payment. The Federal finances are pure Zen, always in the present. If the government expenses exceed tax revenues, the government borrows and the bond buyers give their money to the government. The government is always paying interest on its bonds. From the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s the interest on bonds was so great that the government couldn’t start any new social programs; it was using a quarter of all tax revenue to pay interest on bonds. By the end of the 1990s Federal revenues were steadily exceeding expenses at the same time interest rates payable on bonds were falling and taxes from a growing economy were increasing. The government was issuing few new bonds in the recycling bond market.

There was worry, in the late 1990s, that the American government wouldn’t be issuing new bonds anymore and the financial currency of the world would be harmed.

Cash deficits, starting in October 2002, put an end to that worry.

This whole matter needs some perspective. The total annual productive output of America is $12 trillion this year. That is about $100,000 per working American. The Federal government taxes and spends about $2 trillion per year. In the worst recent year the tax revenue was only about $2.0 trillion, roughly $0.1 trillion under the expenditures of $2.1 trillion. The $0.1 trillion (one tenth of a trillion dollars, 1% of the total U.S. tax revenues), the deficit, was paid for by people who bought government bonds. The deficit, as you can see, is a rather trivial amount of money relative to America’s output.

So if surpluses can’t be saved and deficits are transfer payments from bondholders, what are the potential future problems with aging baby boomers?

There is only one problem a government can create for itself. That problem is to continually run large deficits and end up paying higher interest on its bonds, which restricts what necessary services the government can spend money on. The EU has set the term large deficits to mean over 3% of total national output. The U.S. is running a deficit of under 1% today. France and Germany, our socialized brethren, have been running over 3.5% for three years.

The solution to large deficits is to raise taxes or cut expenses.

The baby boomers will be a problem in ten years because the costs of Medicare are expected to grow at a rapid rate as more people are scheduled to receive Medicare. The interest we will pay on that projected deficit will impinge on other necessary government programs. This potential deficit problem will be solved with a combination of reducing Medicare coverage and raising taxes. That’s life. Understand the issue and sleep well.

Another triumph for Commerce

When Congress passed the Corporate tax package two days ago, it was an historic triumph for commerce.

The underlying issue was the victory of the WTO. I’ve written about the WTO for many years. The WTO is one of the greatest human creations since the millennia-old international agreement to provide diplomats with immunity. (Of course, Iran violated that core agreement of humanity only a few decades ago.)

The WTO ruled five years ago that the U.S. was illegally subsidizing Microsoft, Boeing and a few other corporations. It took five years to review, test and finally enforce that WTO decision.

The most powerful body in the world, the U.S. Congress, has now bowed down beneath the wisdom and brilliant enforcement mechanisms of the WTO. Congress capitulated two days ago. Commerce loves the WTO.

No greater problem could face the WTO in the future. The WTO now stands as the preeminent masterpiece of human institutional creation. I’m not exaggerating in the least.

Nobel Peace Prize

For the sake of disclosure, I know this year’s Peace Prize winner, Wangari Maathai. I worked in D.C. on third world development for seven years from the mid-1980s. Ms Maathai was a popular figure, especially when anyone wanted to show they knew people in Africa. Her strongest qualities were candor, vigor and gentle determination. She must have been a difficult child. I’m proud of her and glad she continues to get recognition.

The significant fact for me is the change in the Peace prize from the Neville Chamberlain/ Vidkun Quisling Peace Prize to the more relevant Nobel Peace Prize.

For the past few years the Nobel Peace committee has played the role of supporting terroists, pacifists and anti-war activists. Previous winners include Yassar Arafat, Kofi Annan, Kim Dae Jung and Jimmy Carter.

Someone must have pointed out the connection between their prize and the Chamberlain/Quisling pattern. Thank goodness.

Triumph of Commerce

Two friends told me about the New Yorker Denby article.

The most interesting part was the New Yorker /Denby connection.

Denby reviews a new book by James Buchan,Crowded with Genius, about 18th century Scotland and the creation of Hume and Adam Smith.

The history of the Scot in the 1750s was done two years ago by Arthur Herman in a superb book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. The reason for interest in the history of ideas about commerce, Scot and Dutch, is because of the triumph of commerce in the past century. The triumph of commerce has been the leading subject of discussion by the inner world of public intellectuals for the past half dozen years, along with discussion about the questions connecting commerce and democracy.

I have no idea whether Buchan's book is as good as Herman's book, which the New Yorker never reviewed. The New Yorker is a snotty, sentimental, smart-ass bunch of Upper West Side nattering nabobs. The New Yorker thinks that socialism triumphed in the last century, at least in the hearts of their fellow Upper West Side nabobs.

So how does the New Yorker staff deal with the attitude of the many public intellectuals who tell them at cocktail parties how out-of-it they are? They give a copy of Buchan's book to their premier ideological lap dog, Upper West Sider David Denby, (I know him and find him a nice guy, but his mind is stuck in some lefty jazz club in 1940) and David tries to tell the New Yorker's wanna-be readers what is happening in the intellectual world.

Trouble is Denby is not competent to put anything in perspective, so he adds the following absurdity: "In the nineteenth century, Smith’s happy view of life in commercial society was rejected by the Romantics as insipid and by the Marxists as naïve, a mask for the despair of alienation. The later development of industrial capitalism, including the emergence, after Smith’s death, of dangerous factories and the immiseration of workers jammed into enormous sordid cities, was not something that Smith had envisioned. But his frequently stated belief in minimal government interference with the economy—the doctrine of laissez-faire—should not be taken as passive acceptance of the depredations of capitalism. Adam Smith was not an earlier version of Milton Friedman or Jack Kemp. He would not have been pleased with the inequities of income in the United States today. He defended the rights of labor and deplored the withering effects of specialization on the individual worker. Smith was a liberal in both the modern and the classical sense. Buried in the work of the great framer of capitalism as a vast impersonal system, there is a modern humanist."

David Denby has never read Adam Smith. The paragraph above is absurd and wrong. It shows no idea what Adam Smith wrote nor where the world is today.

So what is interesting, as I said in the beginning, is how the New Yorker tries to deal with its denial of the modern world.

Many dead Americans

The most discouraging material I read yesterday was a positive piece in The New Republic on how Israel defeated the Arab terrorist war on Israel with measured response, good intelligence and strong military action.

The discouraging material was that the terrorism that began in late 1999 took nearly 400 innocent Israelis murdered and two years before the Israeli democracy had a clear majority with enough will to move against their Arab neighbors. That says something disturbing about a democracy’s ability to survive terrorism.

America has a long history of isolationism. I have long known that Americans never wanted to enter WWII. The majority of Americans opposed the use of American troops in Europe until the first U.S. victories in late 1943. The death of Americans at Pearl Harbor had little effect on American opinion. (The first scientific public opinion polls were started in 1940.)

So how many Americans have to be murdered by terrorists before the majority of Americans will be steadfast enough to fight back? Based on the Israeli experience it will take America three years, with a Twin Towers disaster every three months, to rally a solid majority of Americans against Arab terrorism.

That is discouraging.

The 2004 Election

I trust people who make predictions about elections. I have contempt for everyone who analyzes an election after it happens. That is called rationalizing.

I expect this election to go overwhelmingly to Bush, much like the ‘72 Nixon-McGovern and ‘84 Reagan-Mondale incumbent landslides. Kerry should get no more than five states.

My explanation of why it might not happen, if it doesn’t, is that there is a different big issue being voted on. I think the vote may be about the confluence of two large trends: modernity and leadership.

One long-term trend is modernity. Americans are more comfortable with the development of modernity than most people in the world. We seem quite satisfied with our modern lives. The exception to this satisfaction is the Lefties who are sentimental about the past. Lefties are sentimental about the good old days of labor unions, welfare, the Great Socialist dream, the small farmer and the small town neighborhood.

The other long-term trend is toward America as the global leader, the world hegemon. America didn’t ask for this role and many Americans don’t want the burden.

I see a confluence of these two trends. Modernity includes a high level of selfishness, self-satisfaction, hedonism and radical individualism. Leadership, on the other hand, is the uninvited global burden, is an unwelcome intrusion on radical individualism.

These two trends may be in conflict and the conflict may be expressed by voters in this election.

This confluence means internal emotional conflict. This modernist-leadership conflict may be what we will see in the 2004 election.

Do you believe in fate?

I realized today that Bill Clinton may have been a victim of fate. His greatest dream was to be a peacemaker in the Middle East. He had a partner in Arafat who was completely unable to keep his commitments and walked away from the Oslo peace talks. Arafat destroyed Clinton's dream of being a great president.

Those of you who weren’t in Washington may not know that Bill Clinton was universally viewed as a man who couldn’t keep HIS commitments. Was Clinton, in the peace talks with his eight-year long buddy Arafat, a victim of fate? A case of fate punishing Clinton for his own inability to keep commitments?
The story in Washington was that
Clinton faced an impeachment hearing because no House Democrat would step up and take any action, legal or parliamentary, to stop the impeachment from rolling ahead. Every member of the House, in both parties, had experienced Clinton make an individual promise and fail to deliver. This was true for every House member.

The same was true of every Senator but the Senate, according to script, made the impeachment issue into a matter of the Presidency, not Bill Clinton and the blue dress.

Tradition lost

This is a photo of a picket line in front of the Four Seasons Hotel. The photo doesn’t show the sound coming from these pickets. They are pounding drums, pots and pans, and blowing whistles from 6 am to 10 pm. They occasionally chant some variation on 2-4-6-8 who do we appreciate? or hell no, we won't go! but directed with venom at their employer.

The tradition that is lost is the repertoire of songs and chants developed over fifty years in labor picket lines and public demonstrations. I used to sing and chant interesting words that were created by good writers and intelligent organizers to generate solidarity. They are gone from picket lines and they have been gone from demonstrations for more than a decade. Pickets and demonstrators have no connection to their history.

Listening to this horrid sound must be most painful for the people in the picket lines.

The strike is so foolish as to hardly warrant comment. It is about a reduction in pay in the form of new requirements that workers pay for more of their health insurance. Most people who have their own business can’t understand the complaint about an additional $40 per month for health insurance for union members when we pay $400-$550 per month for our health insurance with no help from anyone. The last big grocery store strike on this issue was a loser for the unions.

The union called a two-week strike at four of the largest hotels. Ten other hotels joined the core four and locked out their union workers and brought in staff from around the country for the biggest month of business in four years (October in S.F.). Now the union wants to negotiate when the two weeks are up.

I’ll bet the hotels will keep the lockout going for the next six months of off-season, when they would rather not have workers. It is profitable to keep the workers out when they are not needed in the off-season. When the union workers come back in May or June they will have none of their demands met and will have lost many months of wages.

North Beach Yahoo

Yahoo has installed a public outdoor computer in North Beach next to a bus stop. There is a similar installation in New York and L.A.

I used the Yahoo computer on the first day, before it gets trashed. I put in the URL for this blog.

For a little while we had the public looking at the same blog you are looking at.

My reaction was strange. I realized that I really write this blog for people to whom I would talk face to face comfortably. The reality is that anyone can read it, even people who would hate what I have to say. When I see this blog as truly public, I have second thoughts on what I should write.

I must be fooling myself to think of this blog as more like a book, bought by interested readers, and less like a billboard.

The Pope, Madonna and Mainstream Churches

I was asked by a regular reader to comment on the Catholic Church and Madonna and her interest in the Kabala.

I have little to say about the Catholic Church except to voice my persistent distress at the current Pope who regularly adds his wrong-headed, Medieval and unsolicited advice to the Middle East, where he has no influence on the parties. At the same time, he and the hypocritical Church have never said a word about Belfast where Catholic terrorist are on one side and the Holy Roman Peace Loving Church could have a big influence.

Madonna is a different story entirely. Madonna is a modern person. She has a wonderful voice, chooses her songs well and is a good actress too. Any modern person, like Madonna, can recognize that he or she has “more than enough” and accept the higher challenge of finding his or her own authentic identity.

People commonly look everywhere for their identity. Kabala is a good place to look and Madonna is looking. The freedom to search for authentic identity is one of the great blessings of commerce and modernity. Good going, Madonna. Kabala is a Jewish Zen. Meditation and the esoteric have a long tradition in Judaism. The esoteric traditional interpretation of the main prayer, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One,” is that we live in a great realm of nothingness out of which all that we see and know is formed and yet everything remains nothingness.

The only wisdom I have to offer Madonna and other seekers is that authentic identity is usually right in your shoes when you get up in the morning. Madonna, if she is fortunate, will wake up one morning, put on her shoes and say, "I am a singer and an actress … I’m going to find every way to make use of my talent and work with others to jointly expand our talents." Madonna will be happy and will then be able to stop searching.

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If you’re fortunate you haven’t noticed that two mainstream churches are considering divesting investments from Israel. One is the Presbyterians, the other Episcopalians. Both denominations are acting like Arab nations. Their internal problems are so severe that they select a distraction -- hate the Jews -- to keep members from civil war.

Both American Presbyterians and Episcopalians are losing members rapidly, about 20% every ten years. The reason they are losing members is the same reason they are making their denominations less hospitable to their members with every absurd action. They are wed to Lefty ideology.

As with Madonna, many modern people are seeking authentic identity. Mainstream churches are offering them Lefty political ideology instead. Such behavior by churches is counter-productive. Lefty political ideology is a substitute for authentic identity. Ideology is definitely inauthentic identity. Churches cannot be helpful to their members if they are boring forums for Lefty gospel.

The real audience for mainstream churches, young prosperous Americans, are offended by the Lefty ideology they see in mainstream churches and are going to other places.

Photo Album

I am learning how to put photos in a photo album on this blogsite. To get to the index of photos of Tokyo that I have posted so far, click on the word Commerce under the photo at the bottom of the left-hand column. I have about three times as many photos remaining to be uploaded.

Two photos remain significant: Sacred Place 1 and Sacred Place 2. You can click to see the photos, which are now in the photo album with the comments. There are earlier blogs that also comment on these sacred places: 1 and 2.

You are seeing an evolution of the idea of commerce on this blog. It would never have occured to me that there were sacred places of commerce. Add your own observation.