Pro Commerce

Chirac's juices

Recitation of facts:

2002 France offers Turkey membership in the EU in return for blocking American regime change in Iraq by refusing passage to troops. Turkish change of heart eliminates a Northern Front and repositions 35,000 troops.  Consequence, defeated Iraqi troops allowed to meld into population at great loss of American and civilian Iraqi lives. Serious harm to American global peacekeeping role.

2005 French populace votes “non” to EU constitution because of the Turkish threat. The EU constitution means equalizing French agricultural subsidies to Turkish farm subsidies at the cost of very heavy new taxes.  Turkey is still 50% agricultural.  It also means massive Turkish labor migration to France.

Chirac is stewing in his own juices. White House drinks non-alcoholic toast.

Brain power

A recent New Scientist had an article on 11 things to do to increase brain power.  Brain power is a nonsense idea.  The brain is not the site of intelligence, the mind is.  The mind is a social institution which is why our vocabulary changes depending on who we talk to.

Of the 11 things to do, I only find three to be valuable.  One, is exercise. It is demonstrable for me and the people I know who are genuinely capable of thinking that exercise is vital to thinking.  (My definition of thinking leaves less than 1% of the population actually doing it since thinking, by definition, means synthesizing differences in the concepts one holds. Thinking creates new concepts and virtually nobody does that.)

Two, is meditation or its equivalent. Being able to be physically and mentally still are key to clear perception which is vital for thinking.

Three, is reading of complex material. The New Scientist article mentions exercise in short term memory. For me this is reading complex material.  Reading itself requires grasping the meaning of an entire paragraph and remembering a sentence fragment before turning a page.  These are major feats of short term memory.

The other eight ideas in New Scientist are based on the assumptions that the brain, as a physical entity is somehow directly connected to intelligence.  Considering the number of brains around and the amount of individual intelligence, the thesis is ludicrous.

Democracy yes or no

One blog that I wrote last year gets endless requests from young students asking for help in writing essays about democracy pro or con. 

The issue can only be handled by breaking up the term democracy.  To argue democracy pro you need to pick a model you like, such as the U.S. Constitutional republic with the executive and legislature separate and government powers widely distributed geographically, or the Japanese-English model of a multi-party legislature where the executive is derived from the legislature.  The con argument on these countries is that America was a basket case for thirty years because of a baby boom population that resisted an unpopular war.  It was only cured by an external attack that unified the country.  Japan (and Mexico) were stuck with one centrist party for forty years.

There are many bad examples of democracies under dictators such as Palestine under Adolph Arafat, the Soviet Union for eighty years and recently Iran under the council of Mullahs. There are failed democracies: Algeria, Chile, Turkey, Venezuela, Pakistan and Argentina where democracy was used to install dictatorial regimes and overthrown by the military.

There are plenty of ambiguous examples, for pro or con, where we have extreme democracy such as India, Switzerland and Israel.  India and Switzerland have the problem of democratic inertia. Israel has the problem of surviving against monstrous external enemies when some of the enemy's relatives live in Israel. Israel has an Army that needs clear goals and public support to protect the nation -- very difficult in a democracy.

Lastly, I wrote a book on true democracy. True democracy requires true representation not the horrible biased group of self selected people generated by elections. True representation requires a legislature based on a random sample of the population.  This has only been tried by the  citizens of Athens.  I believe that a true democracy would be a powerful and successful form of government but it would have to be tempered by some form of representation for the commercial forces of society. Such a system remains to be tried in the future.

Third world development (2)

(Part 1 below)
Three projects that appeared to succeed.  One involved teaching West African stove makers how to use local clay to line the stoves, raise the temperature and use less firewood.  The stoves were locally made and sold well in the market. Similarly, treadle pumps were designed for local metal-smiths to build and repair for use in raising water 25 feet for small scale irrigation.  Neither of these devices had a use in the customs or geography of any other third world nations.

Third was a locally made oil-seed grinder that succeeded very well in the one West African country with good metal-smiths. When the project tried to export the grinders to neighboring countries where they were initially successful, the project failed because the metal-smiths in neighboring countries lacked the skill to make repairs.  Importing and exporting of anything (except food and small trade goods, mostly illegally) are doomed to failure because import-export requires good government and suppression of corruption; not to be found in most of Africa or most Third World countries.

Third world development (part 1)

Tokyo
I'm seeing old friends from my days in Third World development.  I don't know whether I've ever written a summary of my experience.  Three projects were failures and one was almost successful.  The lesson was clear.

The most horrifying failure was an Indian project to raise the earnings of rural untouchables who collected leather from dead animals and sold it in raw dried form for processing in Calcutta. The development project paid for the building of treatment/drying buildings and  environmentally safe settling ponds for the hazardous acids used in the processing (hundreds of such buildings were built around India.) I saw the project in the third year after the Calcutta processors had refused to buy the pre-treated leather and were starving out the untouchables to stop them from doing the pre-processing.  The Calcutta  processors had succeeded in starving the untouchables and had gained political control of the untouchables' communal organization.  Tragic disaster.

The next approach was to change the entire supply chain simultaneously.  This was done with wool, starting with improvements in the sheep pastures and going all the way to improving the design of final export wool sweaters.  The project succeeded in Guatemala and failed everywhere else it was tried. 

I went to Guatemala to find out why and was fortunate to meet a retired State Department official in a swimming pool. She explained, confidentially, that nearly every development project was tested in Guatemala because it was easy to fly there from Washington D.C.  The Guatemalans had learned to be good test subjects and take the money and make the projects appear to succeed.  However, after the Washington bureaucrats left, the Guatemalans always went back to their old ways.  I then saw much evidence of old dead projects, to confirm what I had been told.

What would Hamilton do?

I've passed the point in the Ron Chernow book Alexander Hamilton where Hamilton has won the Revolutionary War with his brilliant strategic advice to Washington and had his influence on Congress in directing the war, has led the drive for the Constitutional Convention and been the key author, written the Federalist Papers to gain the final State ratification and created modern America with his design of the Treasury, tax collection, central banking, government bonds, the bond market, the stock market, bank credit and created a budget surplus in his first year. 

My question is “now, two hundred years later, that we have the commercial nation that Hamilton conceived, what do we need to do to make it more successful?”

The answer first requires acknowledging the brilliant innovations of the 20^th Century that are our commercial building blocks.  The creation of the Federal Reserve, giving it independence in 1947 and setting stable goals for the money supply.  Insuring banks, bailing out savings and loan associations, permitting national banking. Abandoning the gold standard and creating the WTO.  Ending retail sales price enforcement, ending state usury laws, cutting tariffs sufficiently to create a domestic market for foreign goods and creating NAFTA.

The package of new institutions that we need are to get rid of  the vestiges of the Jeffersonian-Confederacy.

First, our labor force needs greater flexibility, especially 13 million public employees. We need a national system to encourage job movement that carries elements of seniority and pensions to new jobs especially for teachers, police and fire fighters.  We concurrently need to replace most seniority and job security with better measures of meritocracy. We need stardardized labors laws nationally as well as standardized business taxes.

Second, our tax subsidies to rural-suburban areas and home ownership needs to end so that we can have a denser more efficient transportation and communication infrastructure.

Third, we need to raise the level of public and market honesty.  That means ending the residual class stigma of deceptive prices like $1.95 or $7.99, tipping and other crude behaviors that are not found in more honest societies like Japan, Holland and Sweden.  It means standardizing national accounting practices and significantly raising the quality of legal and accounting professionalism.

Lastly, we need to research and evaluate the historical elements that have created our wonderful mega-machine of commerce, appreciate and enshrine its founders such as Hamilton and recognize the vast genius of the institution that we live in.  Where is the Smithsonian museum of commerce?

Budget or dead bodies

My question is: “Which is more likely to move a bureaucracy, budget cuts or dead bodies?”

The question has meaning because the International Red Cross only recognizes a cross and a crescent as its symbols despite the long existence and extensive use of the Star of David by the Israeli red cross equivalent.

Next year the International Red Cross is going to change its symbol to a red rectangle at a 45 degree angle on a white background so as to eliminate the dispute that has arisen.

The dispute became public six years ago when Libby Dole, President of the American Red Cross made it an issue and started to withhold U.S. contributions to the international body.

Since 2001 the International Red Cross has been obligated to visit Moslems in many POW camps and in Moslem areas.  With the Red Cross symbol in conflict with the Islamic view that the current world affairs are the 4^th Christian Crusade, Red Cross workers have been threatened and in a few cases killed.

So why is the International Red Cross succumbing to pressure to change its symbol; Budget withholding or dead staffers?

Radiation measurement

Tokyo
I've decided to give you a radiation measurement every Sunday morning. The blog date shows Saturday the 28th at 5pm but the time in Tokyo is 9am Sunday morning the 29^th. 

The radiation meter shows under .02mR/hr, 11 clicks in 60 seconds.

The Japanese are a fairly homogeneous people.  Based on only two interviews so far, the Japanese conclude that the North Koreans are insane because they have kidnapped 20 people over 25 years to help them learn and translate Japanese. There are tens of thousands of North Koreans in Japan who could have been hired to do the job. 

The Japanese also believe their government wouldn't hesitate to use the new launch phase missiles in the Sea of Japan to shoot down a N. Korean test missile.

Difficult for immigrants (part 2)

Tokyo
I got to talk to a high ranking Japanese government official responsible for helping the resettled Latino-Japanese. He had a problem that I knew a little about.

Since the mid 1980s the descendants of Japanese who migrated to Latin America over the past century (mostly to San Paolo, Brazil) have been returning to Japan, mostly to Gumma prefecture and Okinawa.  The Japanese government encouraged this wave of immigrants because it hoped the Latino-Japanese would be accepted into the population by a nation on the verge of losing population (it is now, 2005, losing population).

Nearly a half-a-million Latino-Japanese have returned to Japan because they can improve their economic status over what they had in Latin America. Unfortunately they have not been welcomed, in spite of looking like the rest of the population.  Like most people in the world, the Japanese are xenophobic.  A native Japanese can know the exact social status of any other Japanese based on language and posture.  Latino-Japanese and other immigrants are instantly recognizable as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and are treated as such.

The Japanese official I met told me that the crime rate among the teenage Latino-Japanese immigrants was astounding.  Not a surprise to me, I told him.

Jews, who had no crime rate in East Europe beyond the Pale, became the source of a tsunami of crime when them immigrated to New York City in the first decade of the 20^th Century.  More than half of all crimes were caused by Jewish immigrants, resulting in the creation (by established Jews) of a Jewish criminal court system and Jewish prisons in New York. 

Crime is one of the problems inherent in immigration that America has learned to live with, and still lives with today as immigrants continue to arrive.

Difficult for immigrants (part 1)

Tokyo
I attended a conference on the relationship of Japan to Japanese-Americans.  This whole relationship began because a group of disaffected veterans of the 442^nd regiment from WWII wanted to preserve their frustration with the U.S. Government. After forty years of frustration these men and their allies decided to create a Japanese-American Museum in Los Angeles. It opened in 1992 on East First Street and since then has created an implicit demand that the Japanese government acknowledge its existence.

Several things my beloved readers may need to know. In the mid-1980s,  I worked on the Restitution Bill to pay a modest stipend to the surviving interned Japanese-Americans and to acknowledge the horrible injustice done to them.  The bill passed, but the issue never got the media attention that it warranted and it never did what I hoped it would, which was to call attention to the unremitting Japan bashing that lasted from 1978 until it ended in 1992.  The Japan bashing was run out of a Navy department office. The annual Japan bashing began each January 1^st and extended to March 31^st.  The leading public figure preaching Japanese hatred was Congressman Richard Gephardt (an unpunctured boil who still epitomizes racist evil).

The 442^nd regiment was created from volunteers and drafted Japanese-Americans who were living in internment camps.  The 442^nd unit had the highest and most incredible fatality rate of any military unit, probably a result of high ranking officers' anti-Japanese sentiment which sent the Japanese-American troops into the jaws of death.  The unit also had the highest rate of honors and awards of any unit.

The parents of these servicemen, also born in America, were never given citizenship, living their entire lives as “alien enemies.” Their parents were never reimbursed for the property confiscated from them during the internment.

Those 442^nd soldiers created their own museum and now are forcing Japan to acknowledge their existence.

Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj

Tokyo
How can the word Tokyo drive away readers? 

My readership has dropped nearly in half since I came to Tokyo.  There are many possible explanations.  One is that my readers are just as prejudiced against Japanese as are most Americans.  Another is that many readers are interested in material about San Francisco, in spite of my clearly stated view that San Francisco is in a death spiral heading toward oblivion as a romantic outpost of Disneyland. The least probable explanation is that many people read my blog before they phone or visit me.  That would account for dozens not thousands of readers. There could also be many other explanations, like the season.  I had a drastic drop in readership in December, the greatest drop was around Christmas when few people are at work reading blogs.

Intrepid and foolish, that’s me; so I will continue on the Japan track.

The name at the top is the birth name of the top sumo, who is obviously Mongolian.  I have watched sumo on tv for several decades. I went to my first live basho (fight) on Saturday, the second to last day of the current third-out-of-six annual tournaments. Saturday was when Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj wrapped up his 14-0 win over all the other sumo.  Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj is called Asashoryu in sumo and he is one of the most powerful and beautiful of all the sumo I have seen.

I find sumo elegant because it is so simple.  It is also ancient. Two fighters are in a ring 15 feet in diameter, nearly naked.  The looser is either pushed out of the ring or touches the clay ground with some body part other than the bottom of his feet. The only rules are no closed fists, no choking and no kicking in the groin.

What attracts me to Asashoryu is not his size, he is smaller and lighter than most of the sumo he fights, it is his style.  He is so low to the ground, so stable and so much in control of his mind and his body that he just marches forward pushing every other sumo out of his way. A Caterpillar tractor pushing over a five story building.

Missed five years of history

There are many people who missed the past five years of history, blinded by their lefty ideology.  Prime Minister Ariel Sharon summarized what they missed in a speech in New York a few days ago:

“.... President Bush and I exchanged letters.  The President’s letter, endorsed by both Houses of Congress, clarified the United States’ position on several critical issues for our future:

“Israel’s right to defend itself by itself against any threat, and to have secure and defensible borders; the major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria will remain part of Israel under any permanent agreement; there will be no return to the 1967 borders; and there will be no entry of Palestinian refugees into Israel. 

“We also agreed that the Roadmap will be the only political plan towards an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Further, for those who were sleeping the past five years, the historic change was the creation of one great man, George W. Bush, who provided ..."friendly leadership, maybe the most friendly leadership that we ever had here (in the U.S.)”

Stereotype and prejudice

My thesis here is simple.  The difference between a stereotype and a prejudice is the difference between acknowledging an average and denying the range of a distribution.

Call it the Yao proposition.  Based on averages, the Chinese are shorter than Americans and Japanese are too.  That statement is a stereotype based on averages and it is accurate. 

The prejudice I heard all my life has been that we would never see Chinese basketball champions and never see Japanese baseball players compete effectively on American baseball teams.  These were prejudices because they deny the existence of a higher end of the distributions involved.

There are positive and negative prejudices. Each denies the distributions involved.

Blacks have done poorly in American schools for the forty years since Brown v  Board of Education.  That is a stereotype based on averages of educational measurement.  The stereotype hasn't kept individual blacks from rising to the top positions in business and government because the range of educational achievement among blacks is large. Jim Crow, that kept blacks from rising to the top in America was prejudice.

Jews have higher average educational attainment and higher average incomes than the rest of the (mostly Western) societies we live in. That is an accurate stereotype.  The prejudice associated with this stereotype is that Jews control the societies they live in.  Except for Israel, Jews have never, anywhere had a higher proportion of participants in positions of power than their averages would generate.  Jews have no greater power than would be expected from a normal distribution of the population with the high averages in education and business that Jews begin with (when they are allowed to get and education.) 

Of course, prejudice has meant Jews would be killed in Europe or banished as we are in most Muslim societies today.

Bicycle evolution

Tokyo
The Japanese are probably the wealthiest population on the planet that regularly ride bicycles as transportation.  Only the Danes and the Dutch seem to come close to the Japanese in their love of bicycles. 

It should not be surprising that bicycles have evolved in an interesting direction here.  While Americans, my friends and clients in the Briarpatch, invented the mountain bike, the Japanese have created and perfected the electric bike.

The electric bike uses electric motors as a supplementary source of power for hilly terrain and for carrying weight, such as groceries or a child. The electric motors have become compact over time.  The rechargeable batteries get smaller and longer lasting every year. Riders turn on the electric auxiliary power, with their thumb, when needed.

These days I seldom see a battery taken off a bike for recharging during the day.  They are more likely to be recharged over night.  Even then, I see many bikes with the battery still attached at night, apparently lasting several days on a charge.

The photo on the top shows a bike with a small motor powering the rear wheel.  The bottom photo shows a bike with front and rear electric traction.

Opinionated media

The current debate about opinionated media is of interest to me.  Virginia Postrel has called our attention to the work of Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer on the role of competition in creating a new market for strong opinions in the media.

My perception is different.  The genius of Rupert Murdock and Rush Limbaugh in creating new voices in the popular media is much to be appreciated, though Podoretz, Buckley, the Kristols and friends had an important earlier role.

My view of the current media opinion battle derives from having looked at newspapers in America over several hundred years.

We are still fighting the media battle of the Federalists (Hamilton) and anti-Federalists (Jefferson) and the anti-Federalists have been in the ascent for two hundred years until the past decade.  We have been fighting the Civil War and the Confederacy has been in the ascent until the past decade.  The same is true of the Socialism versus Capitalism battle which is still perceived in the terms dictated by the Socialists. Capitalism is a Socialist term that is meaningless in any other context.  The battle is really State Command versus the commercial market.  This battle has begun to change though State Command has been ascendant until recently.

I think we have the emergence of a new and important battle: ideologists versus anti-ideologists.  That is the media opinion battle that is going on.  What we see are the ideologists fervently demanding that their view is global, rational and true.  The anti-ideologists arguing for a relativism in politics, policy and perception.

Yes, opinions are strong; and yes people on each side of the battle prefer to hear their opinions publicly stated in clear, if not vehement, terms. That has always been the case at the early stages of intellectual battles. What we are seeing is the end of several old battles and the vigorous feints and thrusts of a new battle.

Fight on, good men!

Sense of Tokyo

Tokyo
I've never communicated to my friends who haven't been in Japan the immediate sense of relief that comes from getting off the airplane in Japan.  We come from a society where there is a level of fear-induced tension that we rarely perceive. Little kids don't walk or take public transportation to school in most of America today. There are no more stranger abductions today than in any decade over the past fifty years (sorry, that is a fact). Yet we act as though there were.  The tension is pervasive and the relief upon arriving in Japan is exhilarating.

I use three photos to communicate the safe and placid sense of this greatest of metropolises.  The first on the upper right shows two ticket dispensing machines where you choose and buy the dishes of your meal at a working class fast food counter (one of my favorites). You can put in a $100 bill, buy a $.95 salad and get $99.05 change.  From a machine.

On the left is the self-evident photo that you have probably seen many times, young girls traveling by themselves on a Tokyo subway.

The last photo on the right is a seldom seen shot of fishermen on a warm Saturday afternoon fishing in a Tokyo pond.  The fishing pond is in the middle of a commercial district in the middle of Tokyo in the middle of Greater Tokyo. Greater Tokyo is on a plain, larger than the Los Angeles basin or Colorado basin plains, called the Kanto plain.  Greater Tokyo has 43 million people; of these, 13 million come into the central area on weekdays.  The central area is a small oval that would fit in Manhattan below Central Park or cover San Francisco.  In the middle of central Tokyo is this fishing pond. The pond is in a canal that was built several centuries earlier to convey traffic by boat directly to the Imperial court.

Whim driven commerce

If I have an influence on my society it will be the elevation of the word “whim” to iconic status. Someday, I would hope that “whim” has the attachment to Michael Phillips that Protestant ethic has to Max Weber, conspicuous consumption has to Thorstein Veblen and workers of the world has to Karl Marx.

Well, maybe I need some humility here. (Irony doesn't get through blogs very well.)

Whim is ultimately an important driving force in commerce, today.  A few millenia ago hunger, shelter and safety were driving forces in commerce. (The word “needs” is often applied to these driving forces but “needs” is an arbitrary and undifferentiated term.) With the rise of the state, commerce was also driven by state mediated goals.

That period is not gone, but today a large driving force in commerce is whim.  Commerce is a coin with two sides.   One side of the coin is what gets people to work (an image of a new home, a bigger car, a home media system) the other side of the coin is the output of work that feeds the desire to work (cost/price reductions or the creation of tangible examples of the new desires.)

Thinking about this coin, it should be apparent that the words new and bigger are referring to whims.  The desire for a new home or a bigger car or an old 33 rpm record in a garage sale is whim.  A whim drives commerce so long as it induces the person with the whim to do what society calls work.

Money is a universal solvent, a medium of infinite whims. Someone can say they work for money ... which means they can't list all of the whims that are driving their work efforts.

There should be no opprobrium attached to whim.  A whim or a set of whims is a driving force in getting billions of people to work hard every day for long hours.  The stronger the whims the stronger the economy. 

Americans are working many more hours in 2005 than in 1985.  There has been no legal force driving this industriousness, no threat of prison and no fear of hunger.  We work harder, longer and somewhat more efficiently because we have dreams, hopes, desires ... in other words new whims. We have new whims and we produce new goods and services that create more new whims.

The fifty nearly-identical but slightly-different-products on a retail shelf should not be viewed as a sign of mental overload or childish fetish. The fifty products reflect commerce creating and satisfying the wild variety of whims found in the myriad wonderful differences among our fellow workers.

Mobile Haiku

Tokyo
Mobile phones are nearly all connected to the Internet here, even in subways and deep inside steel buildings.  I look at what people are doing next to me on the subway.

I am surprised at the large number of people text messaging and writing emails while standing in a crowd and while walking.  I learned from a friend in San Francisco that Haiku is popular among the young text messagers.

Geiger base

Tokyo
For those readers who are following North Korea and my Geiger counter exploits, I have taken a base radiation reading in Tokyo and it is the same as in San Francisco. The meter reads under .02mR/hr.

A reader asked why I thought radiation would be leaked from the American bombing response to the N. Korean nuclear test.  Because the ostensible rule of war is that we Americans have the right to use nuclear-bunker-busters in response to a N. Korean plutonium warhead test.

There should be plenty of radiation raining down on the Japanese and me.

Puritan demands

Tokyo
Last night Chika was outside a coffee house, on a warm Spring evening, playing a quarter size classical guitar and singing early 1970s American songs accompanied by his bongo drumming friend.

Chika spoke good English, had spent time on Venice beach and traveled much of the world. Chika confirms an earlier thesis I had.

In the late 1970s I built a park for street people in the heart of their neighborhood on 6^th Street in San Francisco.  The park lasted roughly three years before it was closed by social pressure.

I built the park because I got to know a number of street people and concluded that they were mostly people who didn't want to be part of society and had opted out.  I felt they deserved a safe communal park to hang out. 

Puritanism doomed the park. Every political power and every social welfare agency in San Francisco was on my case, daily, demanding that I find work for the people in the park and when they were drunk, I was supposed to get them sober.  It was just a park!

In 1981 the label “homeless” arrived in San Francisco from New York and the park had to be closed because housing was deemed the official problem, not the desire of the street people to opt out of social constraints.

Later, in the mid-1980s, I got to know a few Tokyo street people and they were unambiguous about opting out of social responsibilities, since responsibility weighs heavily here. Every form of social welfare and abundant housing was available to street people in Tokyo in return for meeting social obligations. Their answer was “no.”

Turns out Chika, mentioned in the first paragraph, lives in the nearby Yoyogi Park.  He has an apartment for clothes and showering but he lives year-round in the park and loves his life. Chika is a musician and actor and works when the jobs are appealing.

I would guess that several hundred people live in tents in Yoyogi Park and several thousand more in other large Tokyo parks. Japanese are not Puritan so there seems to be no pressure to drive the outcasts out of the parks.  The outcasts are required to keep their areas clean, keep their tents safe and not to beg.

Where does Puritanism come from?  I find it in desert people all over the middle east and it appears to arrive among northern Europeans by 1000 CE (from my reading of the saga of Erik the Red.)

Tenure and Harvard

Tokyo

Victor Davis Hansen has an argument against tenure; academics are among the least qualified for any such lifetime reward because they accept the humility and servility necessary to get tenure.  I buy that.  I have many friends who have been adjunct professors (untenured) for twenty years. Humble perhaps, but never servile.

A better argument came along with the work of Marianne Szegedy-Maszak who published in the LATimes.  Turns out an entire new field of medicine is developing.  The field is the specialized study of the physiology of women.

The new field arises because women have a significantly different pathology than men. Women get diseases in different proportions than men, such as a higher frequency of rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, myasthenia gravis, Lupus and fibromyalgia.

Women have different symptoms than men in many illnesses, for example in heart disease.  Emotional distress is more likely before a stroke in women; physical exertion more common before a stroke  in men.

So when Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, got roasted by the majority of his tenured faculty for suggesting that physical male-female differences should always be on the table when investigating behavioral outcomes, we can be sure that faculty tenure at Harvard has resuted in a severe restriction on intellectual thought, free investigation and good research.  Summers was right; nearly the entire faculty was politically correct and empirically wrong.

Does tenure result in addled brains, or does your brain have to be addled in order to get tenure?

Since Summers apologized profusely for his reasonable statement on male-female differences in outcomes, I conclude that the Harvard faculty and Larry Summers both deserve each other and deserve to stew in their own politically correct poisonous juices.

Three in the morning

Tokyo

It's 3 am.  I arrived in Tokyo yesterday. Sunrise is 4:30 am because the Japanese don't use daylight savings time.  There is no evidence that daylight savings time saves energy or the Japanese, who use one-third the energy per capita of Americans, would use it.

Most interesting two articles I read on the plane were in the latest Commentary.  One article by David Pryce-Jones traces the foreign policy of France toward Jews over two hundred years and toward Israel for one hundred years.  Pryce-Jones, looking at original Quai d’Orsay documents, finds an unrelenting two hundred years of anti-Semitism and treachery.

The other, a review, by Daniel Johnson of Laurel Leff's Buried by the Times: The Holocaust...  discusses the outrageous culpability of the NYTimes in deliberately hiding the Holocaust while it was happening. 

Of course this should be no surprise to readers of this blog. The NYTimes only recently apologized for eulogizing Stalin at the peak of his murderous rage and accompanying show trials.  The current NYTimes has covered Saddam Hussein and Adolph Arafat with the same degree of aplomb they previously used for Stalin and Hitler.  The NYTimes these days gives George Bush more hostile coverage than they give Robert Mugabe.

Geiger counter

I'm leaving for Tokyo tomorrow for two months and taking a Geiger counter with me.

Why?  Just in case North Korea detonates a test nuclear device, Tokyo would be downwind and I want reliable data on radiation that I am exposed to.

I hope North Korea doesn't set off a nuclear device.  The consequences are clear.  Within one or two hours of the detonation, the U.S. And several allies will bomb nearly all the infrastructure of North Korea, including some potential sites that may leak radiation.

Is this obvious?  Yes.  The issue is that no lunatic must have control of a nuclear weapon, the risk for everyone is extraordinary.  If Kim Jong Il tests a nuclear device that is ipso facto proof that he is a lunatic and has crossed the red line. 

Got it?  He really kills hundreds of thousands of his own people by acting in a lunatic manner. That is the lesson that the world needs to learn for the next fifty years. Yes there is risk but nothing compared to the risk of a lunatic with a nuke.

Economic sunrise

The announcement last week that we are going to close more military bases in the coming years means we are going to have an economic boom as a result. Closing military bases increases efficiency and can result in lower military outlays.

Most people don't know that a major component of the 1990s boom was the closure of military bases.  The reason is straight-forward.  A dollar spent by the government has a very low multiplier compared to a fresh dollar spent in the market economy. That means the economy will grow faster in the coming years.

A dollar spent by the government, of any sort (education, research, military, forest fires) has a low multiplier because it was originally taken away from someone in the form of taxes. The taxpayer is more efficient in spending than the government, a priori.

On the other hand the expenditure of a dollar in the market, that wasn't forcibly taken away from someone else (burglary, theft) will generate new growth in the economy. The new dollar is created when a new consumer need is discovered or a new way to reduce costs is introduced.  The first gives people a new reason to work harder and better the second reduces the costs of producing what we already produce.

Admittedly the government can generate output that has both of these effects, but much less government spending is directed toward increasing demand or reducing costs.

Sunny economic prospects ahead.  Thanks Rummy.

Gotcha

I was about to write a strong letter to my bank because of an unreasonable charge on my statement.  I was wrong.  The bank hadn't charged me, Intuit had.  The problem was quickly corrected by my bank and Intuit gained another hostile former customer.

What I realized was that my dream and my nightmare had come true.  Nearly forty years ago when I was a bank vice president and was inventing most of the bank services we have today, I tested my own version of bill payment (manually).  I found that once a test client was hooked on the service they couldn't give it up.

The nightmare: the amount of trouble setting up the bill payment accounts and the automatic deposits to the account were so great that it was nearly impossible to close the account. Test clients were very angry when the test was not made into a real service by my bank management.

The dream: for me as a banker the new service made it nearly impossible for a customer to leave the bank. The bank could grow at nearly 30% per year if everyone was on bill pay and automatic deposit.  Thirty percent per year was the average turnover in accounts in those days. Virtually no one would have left.

The bank today that has my automatic deposit, auto-payment and bill pay services has really “got me.” I calculate it would take close to twenty hours (scattered over several months) to change all the deposits, auto-payments and bill-payments.

Next century

Will the United States (or its successor institution) still be the dominant force in the 22^nd Century?

I think the answer depends upon which attributes of the U.S. you believe brought us to our current state of global dominance. Let's start by agreeing that commercial dominance is at the core of American power.  World powers have always been based on their commercial base.  That moves the question to an examination of attributes that have generated the dynamo of commerce we have experienced for the past sixty years.

Commerce thrives on six attributes: diversity, meritocracy, openness, markets, technological affinity and decentralization. I argue that these attributes are deeply built into the structure of America and will, thus, support the commercial dominance of the U.S. for a long time. (My book Commerce explains why these attributes favor commerce.)

Diversity is an inherent American quality.  Founded by immigrants from every part of the globe, the inflow has rarely slowed. The anti-immigrant tide has always been held at bay by the needs of domestic business.  Improved technology may make illegal immigration more difficult, but, like money and cocaine, the demand will always bring a supply of immigrants into the U.S.  No other country is the magnet for immigrants like the U.S.  No other country is as able to accommodate immigrants so readily. (Canada and Israel are both a close second.)

Meritocracy grew from the start in the American revolutionary war where ordinary men were valued for their merit and not their status.  This attribute was fed by the massive immigration into the American west where men and women could escape status-burdened towns and cities to start anew.  The Civil War saw the more meritocratic North defeat the aristocracy of the South. The struggle for meritocracy to remain dominant in American will continue. The near total absence of an existing birthright elite is good insurance.  Again, only Canada, Israel, Australia and Japan are meritocratic societies.

Openness is a synonym for honesty.  The U.S. ranks below Japan, Holland, Denmark, Israel and Sweden on this attribute.  But that is still high enough to keep open markets functioning. The federal government has been improving the level of American corporate openness and can be expected to continue doing so.

Markets are generally open and unrestricted in the U.S. Monopoly conditions have been steadily diminishing for decades as global trade accelerates.  The U.S. was a major force in creating the WTO and will continue to support this global direction. The physical size of the U.S. will make monopoly conditions hard to re-establish.

The U.S. has no particular edge in technological affinity. Only Arabs, Latins, Africans and other tribal peoples seem to lack the technological affinities of the rest of the world.

Decentralization is the birthright of America ... an attribute found nowhere else.  The American form of government is always self-organization from the bottom up.  First a water district, then a sewer and electric district, then a fire and police district and finally a school district. Each is formed by a commission of local people.  Americans self-organize from the bottom up.  The commercial value of decentralization in the form of initiative and autonomy are at the core of America.  It is also what protects the rebellious, defiant sources of creativity in Americans.

The American global commercial megalith would seem to have a long future ahead of it.

Reading legislatures

A month ago a member of the committee vetting John Bolton, a supporter of Bolton's, said publicly, “We have the votes.” 

I knew that meant Bolton would be voted out of committee, even though it took a month.

I've worked in politics over decades and I've worked as a vote counter.  A vote counter has an ethical obligation, much like a corporate treasurer, to be 100% accurate.  So when I see a public statement about a pending vote count, I take it seriously.  I don't ever remember an announced “We have the votes” count that was wrong.

Honesty

A lefty friend asked me if I had read the NYTimes article on the British university professors' boycott of Jewish Israeli academics?  I said I hadn't and probably wouldn't. “I rely on the Jerusalem Post for the best reports on that issue” I replied.  She asked whether I relied on Haaretz.  "No," I replied. 

“Is the NYTimes or Haaretz inaccurate?” she asked. "No.  Just unreliable."

The problem with lefty ideologs and their media outlets is that the Left has never held honesty in high regard. (Remember how the Left loved Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che and never let information interfere?)  The left is “ends” oriented, not “means.”  As a consequence the movement has a clear agenda to promote (I have recapitulated that agenda often, most recently here), honesty is regularly a victim.  The rest of the political spectrum has no  unified agenda so it can be honest or not.  It is up to us to evaluate honesty. 

I find the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post to be impeccably honest, and accurate (clearly not the same thing.)

(Postscript: I read the NYTimes account and found it missing two key elements.  It failed to mention the up-coming re-vote on May 26th and the nazi links on the websites of two of the AUT provocateurs.)

Nukes?

When Gary Becker says something it is always accurate.  Becker has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal that explains why we have nuclear power in our future. 

We had better get used to the reality of an imminent and large increase in nuclear power in the United States.  France gets 70% of its power from nukes, Sweden 50%, Japan 30% and the U.S. is 20%.  All those figures are going to rise and rise fast.

Pension plan

In an earlier blog I mention GM's pension plan.  Most people know that United Airlines is trying to default on its pension plan.  GM might very well join United, but first it has to enter bankruptcy and that is not an easy choice.

What is going on? 

There are two kinds of pension plans: defined contributions and defined benefits.  The terms are self explanatory.  Who makes the contributions is open, the employee or the company can make the contribution in any proportion. In a defined contribution plan the payout at retirement depends on the earnings in the pension portfolio.  In the defined benefit plan the payout at retirement is preset.  Companies buy federal insurance for the defined benefit plans.  That is why the government takes over the plan when the corporation is in bankruptcy.

I couldn't figure out why United was showing the relief it sought by getting the government to take over its plan as $9.6 billion, but the government insurer (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) only showed a liability of $6.6 billion.  The answer: the PBGC insurance only covers the first $45,600 per year of each pension.

Some people will cry for the pilots who will probably take the brunt of this lack of pension coverage.   So why are the cabin attendants talking about striking?

Women's movement is dead

I've been confused for several decades. I believed that the women's movement was different from feminism.  I thought the former was a legitimate movement to gain access to jobs and the latter was unrestrained Puritan prudery.

The photo on the right lets me know I was wrong, both the women's movement and feminism were of the same cloth.

The photo on the right is the old roller derby auditorium in San Francisco on Stanyan St. at Waller. These days the banked track has been replaced with a large basketball floor.

Roller derby was wildly popular in the 1950s but died in the mid 1960s. Roller derby is back today.  The sport is just restarting without banked tracks and with woman paying for their own uniforms.  The audiences are large; the athletes still amateurs.  But roller derby is back, alive and healthy.

The obvious pressure that pushed those frisky roller derby queens into oblivion was the women's movement. The obvious newfound freedom to be a tough, aggressive and violent woman arrives with the end of feminism.  Thank god, real women are back on the American scene.

I can now see what the women's movement and feminism had in common.  Both saw men as tyrants and women as victims.  There was no room for real women with all their idiosyncrasies ... their fire and brimstone vitality.