Pro Commerce

Stetson Kennedy

I don't recommend the Stephen Dubner book Freakonomics about Steven Levitt. My problem with the book is that Levitt's work in empirical economics is brilliant and easily accessible; Dubner does a masterful journalistic job of making it banal.

There was one story in the book I loved.  It is about the rapid growth of the Ku Klux Klan (the name comes from the Scots-Irish muddle of 'kuklux' for circle) just after WWII. This growth was stopped by one man who joined the Klan intending to destroy it. He was Stetson Kennedy.  Kennedy's success was in learning the entire structure of the Klan, the names of all titles, like the Klabee for treasurer, the Klexer for outer guard of a local meeting and the various passwords used nationally like Mr. Ayak and Mr. Akai. 

Kennedy, ingeniously talked the producers of the most popular national kids radio program, Superman (I listened to those programs) into using all the Klan secrets in a series of programs where Superman destroyed the Klan.

Membership quickly fell to a trivial level after Superman and Stetson Kennedy destroyed it with ridicule.

The Left looks at its demons

I wrote a blog in this space with this title that was entirely wrong.  I have apologized to Jeff Sharlet a writer whom I horribly maligned in the earlier blog and to whom I have offered a very sincere apology.

There are two articles in the recent online Harper's in the series titled Soldiers of Christ. Jeff Sharlet wrote Soldiers of Christ I, which is a disdainful look at one of hundreds of evangelical mega-churches in the U.S..  This one, New Life, is just outside Colorado Springs, the capital of evangelicism. New Life's pastor is a leader of the largest national evangelical organization. Jeff's article sets up the main premise that the evangelicals are a large vast and growing movement with deep connections to President Bush and the current White House.  (No mention of previous 'born again' presidents tied closely to evangelical clergy.)

Sharlet explains how this particular evangelical mega-church gains strength and appeal by using popular music and a hierarchy of small groups organized around avocations.  He also introduces the reader to the virulent anti-urban sentiment of this particular mega-church.

Puritan fat

I've been through a few airports lately and sat in a few coach seats.  I'm prepared to comment on the obesity of my fellow Americans. 

Writing on a computer in a coach seat it is easy to comment on the negatives of obesity but that is not my purpose. First I call your attention to the fact that anti-fat attitudes have exaggerated the health problem of being overweight ... chubby.  There are no adverse mortality or morbidity consequences to a weight over the magic 25 BMI, as long as you are below 30 BMI.   

Being a Puritan society there is one benefit of overweight and obesity that is important but is ignored or rarely discussed.  Overweight people, and definitely obese people, are less sexually appealing and definitely have diminished sex drives.  The consequence is a more subdued, mellow, stable and less rebellious society. People can work harder, spend more time with their kids (if they have them) avoid the distractions of appealing neighbors and co-workers, and most importantly people can focus on buying and shopping.

Lifetime achievement

I have posted a new photo (by my friend Per Madsen) in honor of my new award for lifetime achievement as a social activist. Note the impish grin.

I am on the No-fly List.  The list is made up by Homeland Security of potential terrorists.  It is not possible to have my name removed from the list and there is no way to get an explanation of why my name is on the list. 

The only consequence of being on the list is that every time I pick-up a boarding pass, I have to show my drivers' license and wait until the clerk goes into a back-room to check  with and notify Homeland Security.  How did I earn this honor?

Bad thinking

Richard Florida joins Jared Diamond as a bad thinker who's thinking keeps getting worse.

Florida became well known with his Rise of the Creative Class that claimed cities with a high proportion of “creatives” had greater economic growth resulting from new businesses. Creatives were drawn by 'three Ts--technology, talent, and tolerance--characterized by a highly educated workforce, and a population diverse enough to include, among other things, a large number of immigrants and a sizeable gay community.' Some of that reasoning is circular.

Now Florida is claiming that creatives who used to migrate to the U.S. are finding it easier to stay at home in their third world countries and the U.S. is ignoring the kind of education needed to create new scientists and engineers.

The Denver plateau mode

Lyons, Colorado
I spent 45 minutes walking, waiting and riding on a bus in Oakland a week ago, I was the only white face. I'm now in the fifth ring suburb (using David Brooks' definition) of Denver on the Denver-metro plateau.

People are nicer here and in Oakland than in San Francisco.  The same is true of Salt Lake City, another place I go to visit grandchildren.  People are more ready to say “good morning” with a smile, to offer help, to be helpful and to exude kindness.

It is the same way people behave after they leave church on Sunday.  They are just bubbling over with the desire to be kind. The pitcher of kindness is about to spill over. San Franciscans, on the other hand, are stolid;  it takes a little encouragement for them to be kind and helpful. Just a little, but enough to evoke a different feeling.

While we are at it.  The reason the Denver-metro plateau is a perfect representation of America today is because it is filled with people who moved to the fifth ring suburbs to raise their children without crime, irony, homeless people, lazy people and angry lefties.  The people who moved here want to work hard, earn money, acquire possessions, be athletic and have open space. They bring talent and skills. Business is following them to these regions for the hard working competent employees that they are and that business needs.

Boom times here, though the residential building is a little ahead of the migration curve.

Systems for life

Lyons, Colorado
I see motorcyclists without helmets on the Colorado freeways. I keep suspecting that the original group that got motorcycle helmet laws passed, the emergency room physicians, have had a change of heart.  With the improvements in body parts transplants, the demand for livers, kidneys, hearts and corneas continues to rise and the value of brain-dead helmetless-motorcyclists rises.  Maybe ER physicians stopped campaigning for motorcycle helmets.

While we are on the subject. Institutional thinking suggests to me that, if we don't already have it, we need medical specialist on the standard ER team who deal with organ removal from brain-dead patients.  The job is inherently in conflict with the Hippocratic Oath and probably unpleasant for most surgeons.  Yet we need people who become expert in organ removal and love their job; so they can share their experience with others in a similar position.

The way to improve skills is to create a technical specialty within an institution. I look forward to hearing that there is a medical specialty in transplant organ removal.

Commerce vs politics

You know when politics doesn’t work. You can see it as a war zone.

Ten years ago Home Depot wanted to open a store in San Francisco in the middle of the home remodeling district. Home Depot already had a store in South San Francisco, which drew $40 million in business from San Francisco.

The neighbors successfully fought off Home Depot and have continued to fight it off ever since. The neighbors argued that it would create traffic, congestion, bad air, and hurt other hardware stores. It is a bad neighborhood to start with and every other hardware store has to deal with the realities of business; some will benefit others won’t.

The next battle will be a week from today and Home Depot has a chance because the only home remodeling store in the area closed (Goodman’s Lumber) five years ago and the city has had a wasteland ever since.

The neighboring businesses (mostly in the home remodeling field) have suffered terribly from the absence of Home Depot and they have slowly gotten into the political process and learned how to fight.  They have also repainted their stores and signs in anticipation of the neighbors arguing that the decline in sales is self inflicted.

Five years with a very unpleasant hardware store (Goodman's) that wanted to go out of business and five years of wasteland. Politics is not a pretty picture. People talk about human morals not keeping up with scientific change. Political processes can’t keep up with commerce.

Emerging clusters

I am quite suspicious of my own observations on this. I await confirmation with data.

I see and feel a growing separation between men and women. I’m not referring to the 1990s “men’s movement” with large gatherings of brotherhood. There is something new in the air that more resembles an Islamic/Latin separation of the daily lives of men and women into different and separate spheres.

If I could measure this change it would be done from looking at random photos of people at airports and transit points and in social gatherings at restaurants.

Return of snafus?

Here in San Francisco I am seeing more snafus.  Is this a pattern?

I find long lines where the person handling the line is incompetent. Buses missing their stops. More store hours that are different than posted. Auto tow services dispatched to the wrong location. Computer repair people who make the problem worse. On and on … snafus.

Today’s snafus can’t be as bad as they were in the early 1980s because the Internet and automatic credit card payments have taken over the worst sources of snafus: bill paying, renewals, insurance invoices, bank overdrafts, auto registration and licenses.

But, are snafus increasing?

Good news

The State Department has announced that the U.S. is trying to set up a direct open line of communication with China. Apparently the U.S. has been trying to do this for some time and China is now showing an interest.

A central point of contact on both ends could mean a more effective and coherent set of mutual policies.

This is good news. China is the strangest player on the international stage. Two thousand years of experience in foreign affairs, fifteen years experience with global commerce and no experience with democracy. Moreover, China is the first society to try and participate in global commerce with a government based on a communist single party.

Judge for yourself

In the early 1980s, when Diane Feinstein was still mayor, the City of San Francisco passed legislation that made it impossible to convert the thousands of studio apartments in the downtown area into hotel rooms, in spite of the rapidly rising demand for hotel rentals. The legislators reason: these small apartments were what kept people from living on the street. This legislation was fought in the courts for fifteen years, by landlords who desperately wanted to upgrade their buildings, but the legislation has been upheld.

Consequence: the only way to get new hotel rooms in San Francisco is to build new ones. Homelessness has been a growing number since 1982 (4,000 to 8,000).

Adam Smith

Adam died more than 200 years ago, yet the brilliant insights he had into the way the world works are unknown to vast numbers of young people and lefties all over the planet.

Smith showed that commerce makes effective use of the great diversity of human wants and human talents.

Smith never assumed that people “should” or “ought” to be cooperative, kind or gentle. He simply observed that religions and ideologies created wars and hatred, while commerce created comity.

Understanding the reason commerce utilized human differences and created positive outcomes was Smith’s great contribution to humanity.

Noam Chomsky and me

Noam (I don’t know him) is ten years older than I. It appears that we both went to a kibbutz at the same time in 1958-59. I don't know where he went in Israel, I went to Kibbutz Hagoshrim. The kibbutz was the perfect communist ideal, with everyone owning the same belongings, common childcare and rotating work duties including management.

I quickly noticed that not everyone was equal. There was self-differentiation and ranking in the form of different cigarettes, toothbrushes and casual clothing. There was work differentiation and ranking; more women were in the laundry and kitchen than men.

My interpretation was that communism was an ideology that was inadequate for even the best intentioned humans.

I assume, from his behavior during the rest of his life, that Noam Chomsky came to the opposite conclusion: that people were inadequate for the ideal of communism.

Chomsky came up with a linguistic model that human language is Platonic, a reflection of inborn structural characteristics. He also has a Platonic model of human behavior and has spent forty-five years berating the world (especially America and Israel) for not living up to his ideal Marxist standards.

Our kibbutz experience taught us each a different lesson.

Morning coffee

For nearly thirty years I have been going to coffee in the mornings. The routine is stable and so are the coffee shops, though they change over time. For most of the thirty years I have used the coffee shop as a place to meet people, give free consulting (to people who can't afford my hourly rate)and pick up the gossip of the world.

One of the most enjoyable parts of morning coffee is to be greeted enthusiastically by staff that have become friends. The photo on the right is my regular weekday coffee shop in North Beach, Caffe Greco; the staff are Jorge, Julio and Carlos. Jorge and Carlos are long-timers, friends, clowns and always full of energy.

The photo on the left is Peets on Market St. near 16^th. The staff are Idallia, Erik and Lynn; three happy, almost ecstatic and always upbeat people. Peets is for weekends and days when I have to start work early at home.

Great way to start the day.

Baffling film

I don't review films. A good reviewer explains to the reviewee the technical and other relevant elements that create the personal response evoked in the reviewer. 

In the case of the Miyazaki film, Howl's Moving Castle, my personal response was to recognize the stunning quality of the graphics and to experience total bafflement at the subject matter.  More over, I have no idea how the technology of the film making, nor the contributions of the director created my bafflement. It all seems like a cultural disconnect.

I've spent more than thirty years visiting Japan and studying Japan.  Along comes Howl's Moving Castle and I clearly know that I learned little or nothing to help me understand the film.

While in Japan last month, I went to Miyazaki's scaled down version of Disneyland: Ghibli House.  Miyazaki clearly borrows from America and Europe as he goes to great lengths to explain at Ghibli.  Disney is easy for me to recognize, the Triplets of Bellville are equally easy.  Miyazaki, definitely is not comprehensible to me.  The core base for his images are not in my repetorire.

Worse than the absence of a connection to Miyazaki's core imagery in Howl's is a complete disconnect from his moral storyline. 

In Miyazki's Spirited Away I can recognize many of the Japanese Shinto behaviors, spirits, approbations, myths and values as well as images.  I recognize them and I am stunningly aware that I don't understand them.  The monster in Spirited Away was a gentle soul who was dirty.  In Japan, the land of the ultra-clean, dirty is a recognizable sign of evil.  One of the monsters in Howl's Moving Castle is the Witch of the Waste, some parallels but very hard to see. 

I can only express my bafflement and true wonder at this cinematic insight into cultural difference that this film offers.  Miyazaki is pure Japanese. Spirited Away was, like the Star Wars series is to America, the cultural triumph of Japaneseness; the largest grossing movie in Japan, ever.

Onion and the NYTimes

The Onion is on the newsstands in San Francisco. Not everywhere; in fact, not in any pattern discernable to me. But the Onion has arrived and is available every Wednesday morning.

My hope is that it will bring a little levity to the misery of San Francisco political life. When I read the Onion, with its hokey fake stories; I find it impossible to read the local rags without seeing all the serious articles as versions of the Onion.

I notice that all the NYTimes editorials and articles are deadly serious as befits a self-righteous ideological rant. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal editorials often have jokes and puns in them, as befits an institution that knows it is important and tries to be a little deferential.

Relieved

I'm relieved now that I have put my 1995 book Gods of Commerce online, available for free.

I started thinking about this in Japan when I considered buying a Sony Librie, the six ounce electronic reading device. I realized that nearly all books will be online in a few years and they will be accessed via online library membership.  Gods of Commerce never really sold and certainly hasn't sold in recent years. It started off with great reviews but never had an audience. The ideas are still out in mid-air, ungrounded by any academic, corporate or popular dialog. 

Its about 110 pages. You'll enjoy it.

Lakoff lost

I read the latest Lakoff (prounced as in Lake Off) book on his advice to the Democrats. I'm not giving the Amazon connection for the book because I don't recommend the book to intelligent readers.

George Lakoff was a source of my understanding the way language is structured to reflect underlying ideas, metaphors and images. The word "over," for example, is a reflection of the image of an upside-down cone;  you can use the cone unawares, to determine if an airplane or a satellite is passing "over" your computer.  Lakoff's main book is Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.  After making that contribution, Lakoff seems to have lost his way.  Each book is worse and the last few are the product of a Berkeley academic party-hack.

Chain stores are good for good businesses

People who don’t understand commerce have a misconception about chain stores. For some unknown reason they purportedly put mom-and-pop stores out of business.

Chain stores must use magic.

I’ve worked with several thousand small businesses and lectured many thousands more on the subject of chain store competition. Chain stores generally bring more shoppers and more traffic to an area. If you are in an area that is benefiting from a chain store you need to know how to benefit.

First clean up your act. Time for a change. Most small retailers and single store operators are a sloppy mess, with dirty windows with the wrong product mix, little connection to their customers, no return policy, unresponsive employees and a reputation for grumpiness.

Second decide whether you really want to be in business. Most small retailers are bored to death with their stores and as soon as a real alternative business arrives, they use that as an excuse to close up.

Third, if you still love your business and want to get a fresh start, you get the ripe low hanging fruit. Your business will become more successful because you know your clientele, you are loved by your customers and you can adjust your product mix to be highly specific to your community in a way that no chain store can.

Contemporary Best

In Hayes Valley, next to a short shopping street that has doomed itself into fossilized preciousness (zoned for business losers), there is a new park where a freeway used to be. In the park is a sculpture by David Best of Burning Man fame. 

The sculpture is made of one inch plywood scrap pieces. The structure will be up until mid-September. It is incongruous and consequently has a light, airy and spontaneous feel. Nice to show visitors to S.F.

Gene pool

One of my heroes and a public intellectual is David Brooks. He went astray on the issue of the educated elites creating a new upper class by pressuring their children to be well educated. That was a subject he discussed a few months ago.

David, two points: first, a class created by working hard, developing skills and having narrow life goals is not a class, even when parents with the same values try to create such a class. Class by its nature is birth derived.

If anyone can get into your group and anyone in it can fall out, it’s not a class.

Mind experiment

Lets draw an hypothetical xy axis. On the up-down x-axis we will have a logarithmic scale of money (income or wealth) from some minus number, through eleven orders of magnitude (-$1,000 to $10 billion.) The center will be average U.S. income or wealth.

On the left-right y-axis we plot happiness from 0 to 9; 5 in the middle. We can use self descriptions of whether an individual is a happy person; we can use evaluations from their friends, workmates, peers or family.

On this chart we can plot a thousand people or ten thousand people.

What do you picture the distribution of points to be?

I see a large cluster of points in the middle with no upward or downward tendency on either end.

To put it another way, there is no connection between money and happiness. Do you see this experiment any other way? Do you think people run their lives with this chart in mind?

Let’s Souter some people

Last week a new American hero, Logan Clements CEO of Freestar Media, started proceedings that will turn Justice David Souter’s home into a shopping mall. This is possible because of Souter’s vote on the Kelo emminent domain case. I like Clements way of dealing with a Supreme Court Justice. Give Souter a taste of his own medicine.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering putting homeless housing on a City owned park on Henry Street. The neighborhood is “good” by any definition, part of the Castro District. The homes are well kept, see photo on the right, and the owners are most likely citizens who have been productive members of society for most of their lives.

Let’s apply the Logan Clements medicine to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. We buy property adjacent to the supervisor’s homes (if they voted for the Henry Street measure) and dedicate the property only to homeless housing. When the supervisor is a renter, the house to be purchased and dedicated is adjacent to the supervisor’s parent, siblings or closest friends and donors.

I know that elected officials and judges often have to make difficult decisions, but there is no reason they should personally be able to escape the harm they wreak.

Poor citizens of San Francisco

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors are about to make another neighborhood into a wasteland of mediocrity and retail boredom.

The latest target of the anti-business klan is an area of Divisadero Street from Haight to Turk (photo on the right) that is going to be chain-store free. Or free of chain-stores with more than 11 outlets.  Two other areas of San Francisco are chain-store free (North Beach and Noe Valley) except for the many chains that are already there.

What is the consequence for Divisadero which is right now so boring that there is virtually no foot traffic? 

First, all the retail stores that the neighborhood needs to function as a genuine neighborhood will be banned. Examples: a UPS store, a Kinko’s copy service, a good photographic products store like Wolf camera, a pharmacy like Riteaid or Walgreens and a good organic food store like Whole Foods. Also banned, but much needed, are banks with ATM machines, all of which are chains and two of which started in San Francisco, Bank of America and Wells Fargo (both of which were driven out of town.)

Don’t buy amazon.com stock

I’ve always told my business clients that customers judge the managerial skill of a company by the cleanliness and neatness that is visible.

The online equivalent is whether the website is clean and rationally organized. 

Random first

I am a champion of the random selection of legislative bodies. I wrote the first article on the subject in the 1970’s and published the first book on the subject with Chick Callenbach in 1985 (A Citizen Legislature). Random selection is the only possible way to get a “representative” body in any intelligent meaning of the word “representative.”

Good news.  Websites are abundant on the subject of random selection, nearly thirty years after I raised the subject. Best news. A random sample of 160 British Columbians were selected in 2003 to design an electoral system for British Columbia. The election was in May of this year and the proposed electoral reform system failed (57% vote with 60% needed.)

Next time, lets hope, the random populace will recommend a random legislature.

Anti-meritocracy

San Francisco

Do you wonder why Morgan Stanley walked away from a very profitable chance to do an IPO (initial public offering of stock) for Morningstar Inc (the publisher of the popular mutual fund evaluation service)?

The technical answer is that Morningstar decided to sell its stock by the auction method as opposed to the longstanding Wall Street practice of handing out stock to brokers’ to sell to their favorite clients. Morgan Stanley doesn’t like the auction method, so it rejected a profitable deal.

Anti-Semitism is a disease

So argues Paul Johnson in the June Commentary, (The Anti-Semitic Disease.) Anti-Semitism, like Anti-Americanism is a pile of incoherent contradictions like any other mental illness. It is communicable like other diseases … look at the whole Arab world and Germany today, it has spread like a plague.

Contradictions are a sign of mental illness. Jews are greedy, stingy, and generous in buying favors. Americans are extremely religious and materialistic; stupid and cunning, aggressive and cowardly. Jews are the source of all the worlds’ ills and so are Americans.

Is society fragmenting?

San Francisco
In the June issue of Commentary, Terry Teachout wrote an article (Culture in the Age of Blogging) suggesting that blogging is fragmenting our society.

No Terry, our society is as cohesive as it ever was. I find that a home schooled 13 year old boy, from Boise Idaho, who has been isolated by his parents from everything in the mass culture, knows who Paris Hilton is, about her porn video and the latest Xbox game.

Backlog of magazines

San Francisco
I read several piles of magazines that waited for me while I was in Tokyo.  I  will cover the issue of Commentary that impressed me in later blogs.

The pile of New Republic's had only one commendable issue, June 27^th.   One op-ed and one article were appealing.  Marty Peretz, the editor in chief is a uniquely gifted mind who is completely out of step with his magazine, for reasons that are unknown to me.  Let  him talk for himself: