Pro Commerce

Correct so often

I have been wrong a few times over my decade of blogging, but I have been right so often, maybe a ratio of 10 to 1, that I am often too humble to mention it.

Let’s begin before the blog. I was among the first people on the planet to realize in the early 90’s that the population explosion was over.  I threw a party to celebrate it.  I discovered this because I was carefully analyzing population data.

The same is true for anthropogenic global warming. I quickly noticed that the data I put on my website was slowly differing from the source at East Anglia. So I blew the whistle on the dishonesty in the data collection.

The massive stimulus by Pelosi et al was easy to see as a repudiation of Keynes.  I found this when I analyzed the stimulus money given to San Francisco and determined that it had a multiplier of roughly .25. That meant that stimulus money actually depressed the economy. Keynes believed the multiplier was between two and four.

I have never believed in peak oil, and was among the first bloggers to welcome the world of fracking and natural gas.

Green jobs have been a farce for me for decades based on my hippie experience.

Obama has been a horrible failure in the Middle East. This point was recorded by me many times. His failures range from his own Jew hate and ignorance of the history of Jews in Jerusalem to his fundamental failure to understand the role of Jew hate in the Middle East as a tool of Arab paranoia.  He has a complete failure to understand the democratic role of Iraq in the Middle East. Most of all he fails to understand the historic incompetence of the State Department in dealing with Arabs and Persians.

Obama has tried every euphemism to obscure the long-term problems we will have with Islam and Arabs. I have been commenting on this all along.

My blog for many months was hitting on the theme that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a combination of government guarantees on mortgages and banks. all of a sudden,  being forced to treat assets on a mark to market basis. Many people are beginning to see this. They still don’t see that future protection from financial collapse must be a separation of the world of finance from commerce with an FLIC, an anti-loan calling program.

There are many other areas, including the failure of the EU, where I have been right but it is boring for my readers to listen to this crap go on and on.

WTO mistake

Russia is being admitted to the WTO. This is a mistake.

I don't know the politics that created this mistake, I'm sure that Russia had to give up something very valuable to her to get this benefit.

However, it is unfortunate for the WTO. The WTO is a brilliant and wonderful human invention. It creates an enormous barrier between powerful corporations within a particular country from creating trade barriers against other countries.

The way the WTO works is to require a series of hearings to determine whether a trade barrier is justified for any national economic reason that trumps the benefits of free trade. If such a hearing (two hearings) determines that a trade barrier is harmful to other nations, it gives other nations the right to impose specific penalties to offset the offending nation’s trade barriers. It usually works well.

It doesn't work when the country that is imposing the unwarranted trade barriers is a single product exporter. That makes it very difficult for other countries to retaliate for trade problems.

We should have learned our lesson with the Arabian countries that created trade barriers against anyone who supports Israel. These were countries admitted to the WTO that only export one product: oil. The sanctions of the WTO don't work on these countries. So what the United States had to do was crash the Arab stock markets. Which it did.

Since Russia is virtually the same as the Arabian oil exporters, we are in a similar position. Russia can be an irrational creator of trade barriers and we can only retaliate against oil. Which makes no sense.

None of the countries that live on one export should have been allowed to join the WTO.

At this point we have to figure out some super entity that can punish the few single exporters of the world when they put up trade barriers.

Really rich like a Ponderosa

You've probably heard or read many explanations about economic inequality. I simply wanted to add my observation.

I think that in the modern industrial commercial world, income inequality is an inherent condition. It is inherent in almost the same sense as laws of physics are inherent in the physical world.

When we look at a distribution of incomes we see several shaped curves. When people want to inflame you with their petty sandbox ideology they give you an L curve showing how much $1 billion is compared to $50,000, an average income. The table on the right is an accurate distribution of incomes with no particular bias.

You will notice that this is pretty much the curve of everything in life. There is a great abundance of grass (under an inch tall), there are verdant shrubs, many bushes, a  large number of small trees, many forests and a very few giant Ponderosa pines (3000 inches tall), oaks and sequoias.

That seems to me to be the natural order of vegetation.

Five years ago I looked at the number of billionaires in different countries around the world and found a very stable and rigorous distribution. There is one billionaire for every million workers.

It seems to me that unequal income distribution is an inevitable consequence of industrial commerce.

I have known people who thought water should not run downhill.  I know many people who are dissatisfied with the world and with the way society functions. Too bad.

I am comfortable with ambiguity about human behavior and values and I am comfortable with the reality of unequal income distribution generated by industrial commerce.

If other people aren't comfortable I see that as their own personal psychological burden.

 

Greed nonsense

I  occasionally hear people complaining about Wall Street greed.

There are three problems with this complaint. First the complainer has clearly not heard of nor understood the contribution of one of the greatest thinkers in human history: Adam Smith. Smith has taught everyone who is willing to listen and capable of modest understanding that commerce is what makes the world prosperous and feeds billions of people because it is an effective way to capture the benefits of greed and other selfish but productive passions.

Second, Smith did not pick any other passions to use as examples of the perverse way commerce can transform a sin into positive social outcomes. I personally consider envy, sloth, jealousy, meanness, narcissism and bigotry to be far worse and not amenable to the wonderful social benefits that can be transformed out of greed.

Third, I have known hundreds of CEOs, many hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, and still more hard driving rich people in business. In virtually no case I have encountered, was greed a driving motive, a partial driving motive, or even a minor motive driving these people in their work.

Not only is greed a self-defeating motive for successful people in our current industrial world it is trivial compared to the real passions that drive people to succeed. Success is most likely the by-product of love of work, love of the productive output, desire for independence, desire for fame, for appreciation, for recognition, for respect and sheer involvement in something important and exciting.

People who wish to complain about greed, need to spend more time thinking about reality and less time promoting their inchoate ideology.

Speakeasy's may return

As a fan of goose liver pate (foie gras), which is to become illegal in restaurants in California soon, I am hoping that we will have speakeasy restaurants springing up.

While we are at it there are a number of pleasures formerly associated with restaurants that are outlawed.

The outlaw list includes horsemeat, cigarettes, cigars and several species of fish and whale.

I don't know what combination of these outlaw foods or amenities would work together and would appeal to a large enough market to generate a speakeasy. Commerce is like water.. it will find a way through almost anything.

I sure hope that some of these pleasures will return to the world in some guise that is available to me.

Original ideas - 6

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

6. Advertising is generally ineffective.  People often respond to this truth with an apparent confusion. It has been my insight that eliminates this confusion and makes a big difference in marketing.

My distinction has been the source of a $200 billion corporation.

Advertising is the entire category of messages that are put in front of you like dog poop on the sidewalk. Advertising is a scatter gun approach that hopes to reach a select small target audience by saturating the public. Called 'banner ads' on the Internet. For me to say it is ineffective is trivial, since economists have been measuring its irrelevance for 70 years with countless colorful examples.  Advertising is effective in a few instances where word-of-mouth is not available: advertising is effective in influencing children and plays a role in decisions for tourists.

What people confuse with advertising, that is indeed effective, is listing. Listing is putting relevant information for customers and prospective customers at a place where they are looking for it. Yellow pages have always been a listing. And always been effective. Signs on the building are a listing, flyers in the neighborhood of a business are listing, signs on a product are a listing.

Most of all, a listing is what Google AdSense offers. It is clickable information at the point in which a potential customer is looking for that information.

Google's success comes from its opening page which has no God damn ads. It is clean and simple. This communicates trustworthiness and competence. Google goes on to generate tens of billions of dollars by being the biggest listing business in the world. A Google listing is where you are looking for that information.

I wrote about this (with Salli Rasberry) in the book Marketing Without Advertising, in 1984, based on a class I taught beginning in 1980. Roughly 20 years before Google. The book has gone through 6 editions and has been a staple in the computer world since it was first published.

Most people to this day do not understand the difference between advertising and listing.

Obama can’t get credit

I comment on politics only when I don't see my observations reported anywhere else.

Recently, Democrats have been trying to give president Obama credit for some of his actions while in office. They are getting nowhere and I wanted to comment on the reasons.

President Obama cannot get credit for pulling US troops out of Iraq and ostensibly ending a long war (except among the tiny anti-American anti-war crowd). In the Senate Obama fully opposed the war. In his campaign for president he promised to end it promptly. He has never supported the reasons that the United States went to war in Iraq. He has never supported the intentional creation of a democratic government. He has never congratulated the Iraqis for their successful transition from tyranny to democracy, whether it succeeds or not.

If you deny everything about the child from its conception to its entry in high school, you cannot expect people to give you credit when the child graduates.

The instance in which Obama was president when Osama bin Laden was killed and is not given credit, is a different reason. Obama will not be given credit for this military accomplishment because his egotism demanded that he personally and publicly take credit for the successful assassination a few days after it happened.

He would have gotten credit if he had welcomed and honored the Naval Adms. (Olsen and McRaven) who planned, supervised and executed the Seal operation.  Americans simply don't give credit to someone who egotistically takes it themselves.

Merry Xmas

Xmas is a good time to remember that we Americans are a Nordic people. The tree, the lights, the songs, Santa and Rudolph (the creation of a neurotic New York Jew from my mother's school class) are Nordic.'

Our language is Friscian at its core, our condiments (salt and pepper) are Nordic and our institutions are Nordic (grass roots democracy).Our morals and a military are Viking.  We are most like the Danes and Dutch. 

America, almost uniquely among nations is a fruit tree with the roots, trunk and main branches that are Nordic.  Like a fruit tree we accommodate grafts easily. Few of our large branches are from other cultures but the smaller branches are Latin, Celtic and West African.

Xmas is yuletide, a Nordic  winter celebration of lights.  When I count the songs and symbols of Christmas I find about 75% are Nordic pantheistic with the rest Christian.

Merry Xmas to you and yours.

 

 

Where do new businesses come from?

Everyone and his dog seems to have an explanation of where new businesses come from. Not just everyone in Washington, not just every presidential candidate..... just about everyone.

Is my opinion any more reliable?

I have consulted directly with over 1000 (nearly 2000) small businesses over a 40 year period and written several top-selling books of small business advice. There can't be more than half a dozen other people in the world with that level of experience with small businesses.

So what has been my experience?

People who start small businesses have above average intelligence, worldly skill and a ferocious hostility to working under someone else. They are rebellious in some emotional way. None of this can be generated by government.

People who start businesses tend to cluster with other people who have similar inclinations. These people support each other in the optimism of their world view. It is optimistic and passionate people who tend to start new businesses. Determined... very determined.

New businesses tend to start in crummy neighborhoods and crummy locations where the unusual nature of their endeavors does not attract hostile middle class attention. Such locations are in poor neighborhoods, warehouse districts and other shabby milieu.

People who start small businesses are risk averse.  The opposite of popular opinion. Small business people are taking a risk by leaving the salary or government employment but they always reduce the risk in their infant business as much as is humanly possible. They reduce the rental costs, the operating costs and the supply costs as much as possible. In most cases they do not pay taxes of any sort during their startup phase. They are funded only from friends and family.

The single most important element of new businesses is that they are a small offshoot of some other business. Meaning they are doing what other people are doing, but doing it a little differently. If it is a new perfume it is a little different category of smell and packaging. If it is a new wearable it is only a little different, no difference in shapes or sizes or in the way of running the business.

Don't think about the Apple II.  It was an offshoot of the Apple Lisa and Xerox Parc Lab. There were many computers at the time and some of my clients were using the Atari for bookkeeping. Virtually no product is de novo. It is generally a variation on an existing product.

Look at what I have said. Virtually nothing on this list can be encouraged, stimulated or provoked by any government action. Get out of the way, that is the most anyone can do other than opening immigration to the millions of people in the world who have the skill and competence to start a new business. Or they can help work in a start-up.

Senior sinners

I'm sorry, this blog is not really about sex. It is about seniors, probably most of them Republicans, living in sin.

There are roughly 40,000,000 seniors who receive social security. About 14 million of these are living in non-marital relations.  What the Census Bureau calls ‘households that are not family or marital’. If we exclude from this 14 million the large number of men and women we know our living without a bedtime partner, this leaves roughly 6,000,000.

A man or a woman who earned less than their spouse for Social Security purposes and has not remarried for 10 years after the divorce, death or separation from the spouse is entitled to the higher of their two Social Security payments.

This leads many seniors, my estimate is over 4 million people, to live in sin with another Social Security recipient without getting married. Getting married would reduce one of their Social Security benefits.

Most of these seniors, living in sin in order to get the maximum Social Security, are probably Republicans.

I cannot identify the precise number, but I suspect that 4 million is accurate.

I am sure that living in sin does not bother many of this 4 million people but they would be happier if they could get married.  Better examples for children and grandchildren.

Lucky on health

A few years ago I reported on the newly established for-profit drop-in clinics when the first one opened in San Francisco. It is still going strong and doing well.

I notice as an employer in San Francisco, where we have trust accounts for health insurance at $4600 per year per employee, that about 25% of that amount is used for medical expenses by employees, annually.  Employees do not like to fill out paperwork for small  medical expenditures.  A large number of them are going to these for-profit clinics.

Here is a new twist on that same do-it-yourself health phenomenon. The photo is an health insurance company with two employees and a counter in the local Lucky supermarket.

On the left is a woman whose job it is to handle your insurance paperwork and deal with insurance coverage issues. On the right is a woman who can handle issues of testing and advise on a few issues such as weight, nutrition and blood. On-site she can do several weight and blood measurements. She can also order blood testing.

Considering that the last for-profit clinic project has now spread to nearly every drugstore and Walmart in the country I expect similar expansion of the type of site in the photo.

 

My fear of government and unions

The 20th century was a long slow and painful (millions died)  period in which the ideology that a strong centralized government could create better human beings, equality of economic outcomes, an end to poverty and prosperity..... in an environment of personal and political freedom was totally debunked. Proved wrong, at horrific human expense.

Simultaneously, one single country became so prosperous, powerful and successful that it also became obvious that free and open commerce was the only vehicle to freedom and prosperity.

What wasn’t learned was the relationship between the two. Indeed it is the power of strong centralized government that can suppress and destroy the prosperity that comes from open commerce.

We are just beginning to see the evidence that government and its powers are perverse and harmful to commerce.

The city of Detroit and many others in the United States are dead because nearly all workers were forced by government regulation to be members of unions. Unions are inherently antithetical to commerce because they suppress merit and individual initiative in favor of bureaucracy and seniority.

Many countries in Europe are now examples of the fact that governments are incapable of decreasing their expenditures. A government is a human institution with an inherent perverse need to always expand, control individuals and corporations and usually increase tax revenues.

Government it turns out, in the 21st century, is the source of death for the realm of commercial prosperity.

This insight is coming to a few of us slowly.  The American Tea Party is the first evidence that this understanding is widespread.

Fortunately, my fear that my fellow Americans will be too slow to understand the reality of government destruction of commerce, even in a democracy, may not be well founded.  A good study of public attitudes finds that nearly 2/3 of Americans recognize that big government is the greatest danger to America’s future.  

I would be out celebrating if unions and the environmental movement were included in the categories of harm that can be done to America’s future.  They rank low.  For the time being only a third of Americans support either unions or the environmental movement. That calls for a nice cool beer.

 

Human rights is wrong

Unless you are reading fantasy novels and using those as your news media, you must know that the Human Rights Community is on the insane side of human rights.

These organizations are taking money from Saudia Arabia to attack issues inside democratic Israel. They are supporting tyrants and murderous governments in the UN. The list of human rights violations that are encouraged and supported by the Human Rights Community is legion.

My point is the same that I made nearly 40 years ago in this article. The idea of human rights is so ambiguous that supporters are inherently evil.

I am not exaggerating. Both between cultures and within cultures something as specific as human rights is not universal.

The best example is the Declaration of Human Rights that is part of the UN charter.

Nearly every article is ignored, abused or refuted by some country in the world that is a member of the UN. Americans do not have the unlimited right to marriage (gays, polygamy) nor to work in a union shop without being a member, nor the right to protection against job loss.

In the Islamic world, none of the freedom of religion rights exist nor do the other criminal and gender rights exist.

The UN Charter is the best example I have of the fantasy that human rights are universal.

Consequently, organizations devoted to treating a fantasy of rights as truth or certainty must result in irrational behavior by these organizations as well as behavior that is self-serving and perverse.

I said this long ago and it has merely gotten worse over time.

Original ideas- 5

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

Several years after publishing the book on random selection of legislators, Citizen Legislature  (also online), I came to an unusual understanding about government.

In the book my co-author and I ended up recommending that the US House of Representatives be a random legislature while leaving the Senate as it is, an elective body. The reason we gave in the book was so that Americans would have a chance to compare a truly random body to an elective body. We were certain the random body would be preferred.

The argument had been made to us by Robert Gnaizda, my closest friend. We accepted his argument.

With years to think about it, I came to a different conclusion. I concluded we had been right to argue for the existing Senate but the reasons were different.

My reasons were new and unique. I came to believe, and have written about it, that random selection will result in a truly representative group of people, As People.

I came to understand that people also exist in many sub institutions.  I am a private pilot, I am an airplane passenger, I am an international traveler, I am a heavy user of the Internet, I am a user of gasoline, gas and electricity. I have active interests and an active role in many institutions.

The political organism must include my sub institutional interests.  Lobbyists already exist to represent many of my sub institutional interests.  It was at this point that I came to realize that we need an elective body that is heavily influenced by lobbyists and money because such an institution represents a true voice of our society that we as individuals would not and do not speak for on a regular basis.

An effective government must have both our complete personal-individual needs represented as well as our institutional needs.

That is a unique understanding on my part that comes out of my original thinking on random legislative selection.

Women’s car design

This blog is about politics in management.

In the mid-1980s, when members of Ford's marketing team realized there was a market for a women's designed car they set a team of women designers to work on a new line of cars.

The team of women, both interior design and exterior, spent the appropriate number of years designing a car that would appeal to women.

When the design was presented to management, authorization was given to proceed with operational implementation.

When it came time for the car to come off the assembly line management had to make the decision to name the car. Management was all-male and quite hostile to the team of women designers and their advocate.

Management made the decision to connect the car, which was largely made up of a Japanese Mazda frame and engine, to an earlier futuristic design called the Probe I.

Need I say anything more. The politics of management and the power of senior managers far exceeded the desire to have a successful new line of cars.

Marketing knew better than to market a female designed car with the name Probe.  Unless someone mistakenly thought women liked to go to their gynecological exams.

The story came to me from my wonderful late friend, Michael Doyle, who was consulting with Ford management at the time.

 

Brown hierarchy

When Jerry Brown was first Gov. of California he carried out an interesting experiment.

Jerry was not a straight-laced person. He chose to drive an old car and refused to live in the elegant governor's mansion.

The Gov.'s office is a very large room with chairs arranged in various locations around the room but in all instances far from the Gov.'s desk.

Jerry chose to meet everyone in a small anteroom off of the main Gov.'s office. Jerry Brown sat in a comfortable chair with people only a few feet away from him in the small room. So his visitors, everyone, including cabinet members, pushed their chairs back to the wall as far as they could get from the Gov.

Jerry properly concluded from this test that there is a necessary amount of space created by hierarchy. You can be close to someone low on the hierarchy but the higher you go the more distance you must place between yourself and the person high up in the hierarchy.

Ozone layer for wolves

 

Don't bother reading this article if you already suspect that most scientists are political and ideological creatures who protect their established views with lies and distortions.

This article is about a Canadian study that found a completely surprising hole in the Arctic ozone layer. The finding was only released when government funding for the research was threatened.

There is no mention of the fact that the supposed reason for the hole in the ozone layer, CFC's were eliminated worldwide at great cost, a quarter of a century ago.

It turns out that the last hole in the ozone layer could have been scientists crying wolf. We know they cried Wolf about DDT and millions of black kids died of malaria since then. We know they cried Wolf about global warming so they changed the name to Climate Change. How about the population explosion that was actually caused by better sanitation but was dreaded by environmental sciences. Let us not forget all the resources that were to be exhausted in the 1980s ranging from fresh water to peak oil.

What else did the scientific world call Wolf about? Will it turn out that lead in gasoline would have given us better mileage and improved our health?  Probably.

How can we know, the scientific community seems to make a habit of crying Wolf.

 

Brother against brother

 

I confess to having been deeply wrong, deeply.  I apologize from the bottom of my heart.

I have on regular occasions railed against my fellow Jews who support the Democratic Party and Lefty ideology over the interests of our fellow Jews in Israel.  

I have pondered this intellectual paradox for several years.  The obvious paradox is that my hostility towards Jews who are hostile to the interests of Jews in Israel is an absurdity.  I’m angry at them for doing precisely what I am doing.

How to resolve this?  

First it has to be put in context.  This is done with the help of Assaf Sagiv, the editor of Azure magazine, the magazine that brings me consistently the most intellectual stimulation of anything I read.

Sagiv reminds me that brother against brother hostility has been endemic in Jewish history.  The torah begins with Cain and Able.  In the desert Moses has the Levites kill the idol worshiping Jews.  Jephthah of Gilead kills men of the tribe of Ephraim.  Israelites kill the Benjaminites.  The battle of Israel against Judah was the reason the destruction of the First temple was possible.  The Second temple destruction occurred after the Zealots killed their fellow Jews in Jerusalem.  In my lifetime it was the Irgun versus the Palmach (resolved by the compassion of Menachem Begin).

So how do we end this brother against brother?

It begins with an essential element that is visible in my hostility toward Lefty Jews. I must be an example for them and for all the people who place personal certainty over the interests of the family.

In my own family, I have a perpetual example. I have three brothers each of whom has a political view different from mine, including different attitudes toward Jews and Israel.

But we are first and foremost, of course, brothers. We do not incite or antagonize one another. Our brotherly connection must dominate all other concerns and even when civil war appears likely we must remember we are brothers.

I apologize to my Lefty Jewish brothers for my hostility to their politics. Please accept my apology. I vow not to raise my voice beyond a gentle chastisement in the future.

 

Odin’s Robe

You won't find this in Wikipedia. Odin is the chief Norse god. I don't know the origin of the robe's name but I learned about this when my children were quite young, from a friend.

The issue is: bad dreams. In a bad dream, usually, some monster is chasing you or you are being tortured with height or fire or insects.

Odin's Robe is the name given to the solution you can use to stop or avoid bad dreams.

In the dream you cover yourself with a white sheet, or go into a white tent or create a white room. Odin's Robe is clearly a white fabric.

I have three children, all used this approach and none had bad dreams after they used it.

Yes you can introduce elements into your dream. Yes you can bring the bad dream to an immediate end.

(Image on the lower left, fella on the left, is a pre-Christian image of Odin.)

 

First Obama kill

Barack Obama lost his class war as I pointed out in the last blog.

But Obama got his first kill in the class war.  The man on the right like the 'Occupiers', listened to the voice in his head that said 'kill the millionaires and billionaires and hedge fund managers and people who fly in private jets' so he went to the center of that land... Hollywood, and stood in the middle of the street and started shooting.

These may be the first people that Barack Obama has killed with his incendiary rhetoric.  It is the begining of a cycle of insane killers listening to the class war hatred coming from the current occupant of the White House.

 

Obama lost his war

It is time to celebrate the loss of Barack Obama's class war.

It is clear to me that Barack Obama created the 'Occupy' movement. Beginning in May and becoming more intense in July and August, Obama never stopped using the venomous phrase ‘millionaires and billionaires and hedge fund managers and people with corporate jets’. He went further and blamed Wall Street and Republicans in the Congress with blocking taxes to create jobs.

Five months of trying to create class warfare finally resulted in hundreds of young people showing up near Wall Street in mid-September to camp out and days later all over the country and in a few other countries similar groups emerged. The people who showed up had no agenda whatsoever. They were merely responding to Barack Obama’s warfare rhetoric.(Adbusters has been around decades and has always been irrelevant.)

We learned two important lessons from this presidentialy sponsored rebellion..

One. Everyone we thought was anti-America and hates commerce joined in the fray. The Occupy protesters were joined by the rest of their cohort: academics, union members, specifically teachers, local Democratic politicians and journalists.  The entire Lefty cabal.

Two. The movement failed completely. It never grew significantly and over the two months in which it took place popular opinion moved from general support and disinterest to strong dislike  ( no one opinion survey on this point seems reliable [they didn't know what question to ask].... they show a general trend).

It is time to celebrate. Barack Obama‘s class war got nowhere. Americans don't blame rich people for the Obama-Democrat malaise. The entire Left has demonstrated that it has no ideas or policies of any significance, mostly babbling trivia and anger. The Left was entirely visible.  It comprises, in its entirety, less than 30% of the public.

A loud but impotent firecracker.

 

Original ideas- 4

 

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

 

 

4. I did a number of public opinion surveys of San Franciscans in the early 1970s. One time, a friend of mine asked me why the public attitudes that I had measured were so different from the legislation coming out of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. I explained to my friend that elected officials were not representative of the public. They were a self-selected group of egotists who responded politically to their special interest supporters.

It was at this point that I realized a representative group of public officials would have to be selected at random to be truly representative.

I had done many surveys over the previous decade and personally interviewed many ordinary Americans. I was always impressed by the respondent’s native intelligence, insight and coherent understanding of their world.  I like ordinary Americans.

Shortly after that conversation, in the fall of 1975, I wrote an article for the Co-Evolution Quarterly suggesting that legislators be picked at random like juries.

Several years later in response, a close friend, Ernest (Chick) Callenbach joined me in writing the first book  (also online) on the subject. We had a great time writing the book because of a common Great Books education at the University of Chicago.

Random selection of legislators dates back to Athens which had such an institution for 200 years. No other similar institution existed in the intervening time.

Over the decades since my original article and book the idea of random sampling for legislatures and other political bodies has gained some support. Along the way a number of screening mechanisms have been introduced.

Part of the reason I was so able to rapidly appreciate the value of a truly representative political body, was that I had worked for the California legislature as an analyst in the early 1960s. I was never impressed with the elected representatives.

I do not support any screening mechanisms of a public random sample based on the statistical meaning or random sample. People who do not want to come to the legislature represent people who are part of the public and needn't come to the legislature.  They will come when their ox is being gored.  People who have mental or other disabilities also need to be members of the random legislature. There is never a way to know their interests unless they participate. It is in these ways that I continue to uphold the core idea that random sampling is the only true form of representation.

 

My environmental victories 3 of 3

My third environmental victory dealt with dolphins.

The story is told in this earlier blog.  In 1978 I visited a fishing village on an island on the North Sea that hunted and ate Dolphins.

My concern was to protect the villagers from the raging whale and dolphin saving American enviro-fanatics.

I was successful in getting a full two-page spread in the Friends of the Earth weekly. The article played on the enviro love of traditional people, worker coops and natives worship of sacred dolphins.

That protected the dolphin hunting and the small towns of the Japanese North Sea for 30 years.

I consider that a victory.

It also allows me to say that the environmental movement in the succeeding years has not been in the interest of the environment nor in the interest of the modern world. The movement has gone too far and is desperately seeking someplace to spend its money. Whether the issues are valid or not.

My environmental victories 2 of 3

My second environmental victory began at a cocktail party at the home of a future leader of the gay community. I saw an attractive woman who turned out to be a marine biologist and I proceeded to talk to her about a recent grant I had participated in to the anti-whaling movement led by Joan McIntyre.

I asked her about my growing concern, based on data I was studying, that showed most whaling species to be very healthy and vigorous with whaling catches well below levels of significance. Several species were being over hunted but only a few.

She said that was not true. If it were true she would’ve 'heard about it from her Jewish friends at Harvard'.  I have never forgotten that phrase: 'heard about it from my Jewish friends at Harvard'. The only sources of truth.

I proceeded to do more research on the data and travel with Joan to Japan. I concluded that the anti-whaling movement wildly exaggerated the problem and that Joan’s campaign to have elementary school students write nasty letters to the Japanese Emperor, were driven by pure anti-Japanese sentiment.

This in turn led me to write an article for the environmental Bible of the day, the Co-evolution Quarterly. I presented the data and the anti-Japanese evidence.

Fortuitously, the Gov. of California, Jerry Brown, read the article and was disturbed. He called in to his office all the leaders of the anti-whaling movement and demanded that they respond to my article.

They didn’t. They simply modified their campaign to eliminate the anti-Japanese elements and the exaggerations about some of the large whaling specie populations.

That was a success.

My environmental victories 1 of 3

This is my Thanksgiving rebuttal. Thanksgiving for me was a wonderful family gathering with 28 close relatives at my house. I cooked the turkey’s.

In one discussion I remarked that the only significant restraints on the growth and vigor of commerce were governments and the environmental movement. I didn’t get any argument but there was genuine distaste for my views about the environmental movement.

Since I know or knew nearly every major figure in the movement I feel somewhat qualified to comment on the negative aspects of environmentalism.  

In one particular case, covered in this blog, I personally generated $30 million for urban environmentalism.  I know the field and I know it’s perverse elements. In fact what I don’t tell you in the earlier blog is that I phoned the leaders of all the major environmental groups to learn about the secret PG&E agreement regarding the 140,000 acre gift to the state.  These were all friends. Not one of them phoned me back. I had to use my highly developed investigative skills to find out the secret agreement. Then I had to use my skills as a pilot to look at some of this ostensibly valuable environmental land.

I know the environmental movement. It is corrupt, self-serving and ideologically hostile to commerce.

Win the lottery

 

The people who play the lottery are making a sad mistake.

The traditional and obvious reason is that the odds against them are so great that they are throwing away their money. On this point I often say, I don't play the lottery but I have the same odds of winning as a person who does play. Why? Because the odds are so extreme of winning that they include the odds that someone will buy a lottery ticket for me, unknown to me.

The real reason the lottery is a sad mistake is in the event that the person who plays it may win.

Virtually every person who has ever encountered a gigantic money pool, whether the lottery, an inheritance, or some other windfall is doomed to lose all their money and generally end up unhappy. Don't take my word for it. Check on any windfall winner.

There have been many studies on this subject over the past half-century. The beginning was a study of winners of the 1950s TV program, $64,000 question. Only three winners ended up better off. One was Dr. Joyce Brothers, who used the money to get the PhD doctorate after her name, another was the jockey, Billy Pearson, who put the money into his existing antique store and the third was a dairy farmer who used the money to buy more cows. The rest ended up pretty miserable and much worse off.

People who get windfall money do poorly unless they have one characteristic: they know who they are before the money comes.

What does it mean to know who you are?  It means you are comfortable in your own skin, you know what your talents are, you know how to use them and you are not searching for meaning in your life. You know what you're meaning and calling are; or you have a pretty good idea.

 

Auto designs

When we look backwards at auto design, we see many examples of efforts to design autos that will survive into the future with distinct and appropriate shapes.

Certainly Studebaker, the Edsel and several Nash products were designed to be avant guard and remain popular into the future. They all failed as have many others.

The photo on the right is of an automobile that is now 20 years old and still looks like a contemporary auto on the streets today.

When this car was introduced, no effort was made to suggest it was futuristic. But it was.

I needn't prolong the question in your mind. This is a 1991 Toyota.

Way ahead of its time and modest in its conception from the beginning.

The Euro

 

One of my good friends and regular blog readers lives in Africa. Since African trade with Europe constitutes more than a quarter of all euro international transactions, he is particularly concerned about the survival of the euro in euro-phone Africa.

The problem with the euro has been known since its inception.  Any country can run a deficit. Spend more than it generates in taxes and other revenues. Most countries do this and they only suffer a devalued currency. Within the EU the effect is to devalue everyone's currency. That is what is happening today in Greece, Italy and the other PIGS. If you import, devaluation hurts.  Germany, an exporter, benefits.

The proposed remedy is to go beyond the current suasion. EU members are supposed to keep their deficits under 3% of their total expenditures. First France broke that rule, then everyone else did too. So suasion doesn't work.

The current proposal is to have some part of the EU approve all domestic budgets before they are enacted.

I don't see how this is possible. These are ostensibly democracies and it is historically unthinkable for an outside power to determine domestic budgets.

On top of these airy fairy proposals is the historic reality that no national government has ever reduced its expenditures. A realist would have to conclude that the PIGS and a few other countries will have to leave the EU.

It is a pure guess on my part, but I think at least five countries will retain the EU currency: France, Germany, Holland, Finland and Austria.

For my friend in Africa, that means the EU will continue to be a functioning currency for the purposes of trade.

 

Original ideas- 3

For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.

3. I learned the best way to help a startup business in the spring of 1974.  To get away from my business office that year, I rented an empty room with a beautiful view and access to the roof on a pier in San Francisco.  

Often small business people would come to me for  business advice. I had been a banker, founder of MasterCard and was treasurer of a very popular Methodist church.

My pier office was intended to give me some privacy, but without telling me, my secretary began sending all the small business people with questions to my office on the waterfront.

With the publication of my Seven Laws of Money in the Spring of 1974, the number of small business people coming to me for advice became a tidal wave. Some days, more than 20 people arrived seeking advice on their small business startups.

When some of them began talking at the same time it became obvious that small business people could help each other more than anyone else could help them. The outcome was the creation of the Briarpatch Network.

I immediately hired a coordinator (Andy Alpine), an accountant and an insurance man. As new people joined the Briarpatch the coordinator put them in touch with similar businesses or businesses with similar problems. Once a week a team of advisers and I would visit half a dozen of the new members at their worksite. We all used common resources.  The Briarpatch grew to several thousand members over a decade, with a peak of 600 at one time in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My approach to helping startup businesses was confirmed six years later when I was asked to help start new businesses in Sweden by a Swedish government agency. I was taken to the town of Philipstadt  where a group of 30 small businesses were together to hear me. I talked for awhile.  Knowing that my English was painful for them to listen to, I stopped and asked each one to stand up and tell one thing that could help their business. After everyone had described their need, such as a truck going to Stockholm on Mondays, I told them to take a break and talk to each other.

The din was overwhelming. They broke into Swedish and everyone talked to everyone for an hour until lunch when they continued.  There was no longer a need for me to talk. Everyone was so wildly excited that someone in their town had the resources and willingness to help them.

I used the same mechanism in Western England and in Paris and Lyon (it failed in Western England where everyone demanded that I "create jobs", it worked in France where it became focused on lending classes). The Swedish project was so successful that the German Marshall fund copied it in Germany and later funded similar projects in the Midwest of the United States.

I wrote about most of the details of small business and startups in my 1984 Honest Business book. The core idea is that businesses can help each other most effectively in their early stages, an idea built into the popular start-up incubators.

Obama revealed

Most Jews who are above average in intelligence and have functioning brains (not frozen in Lefty ideology) have been seeing that President Obama hates Jews and is hostile to Israel.  

At this point, surveys show a steady migration of Jews to this understanding.

It turns out we had no idea how bad it was until Leon Panetta told us.  Read what Barry Rubin has to say. Obama's Middle East is more dangerous to Jews that Neville Chamberlain's Germany.  No wonder Rahm Emanuel left him.

More Wissedom

 

This is a quote worth pondering:

"Women's liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influencial neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible. By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength[15]"
—Ruth Wisse

I personally think that the women's movement as it developed in the United States is deeply American. Our core American experience is powerful women who have always held their own.

I also strongly support independent and fully developed women in every aspect of society including the front line military. I have felt this way and expressed this position long before the women's movement gained traction.

On the other hand Prof. Wisse is correct that the family and related institutions were dramatically affected by the entry of women into full-fledged market based citizenship.

We should learn to cope with it. We are learning to cope with it.

We have already seen several of the most debilitating hysterias fall by the wayside. The belief in child satanic rituals, the horror of massive child kidnappings, the preposterous civil notions of sexual harassment and the absurdity of date rape are passing.

The women of today are beginning to find themselves. Best exemplified by Roller Derby. Real women shoving their elbows into any wimp or wuss who gets in their way.

We are finding many ways to replace the traditional family with more effective child rearing, but the process is experimental and slow.