Pro Commerce

Manufacturers lack retail ideas

I wrote a blog about Tyvek and complained that this miracle fabric has barely been used for retail products.

This is in fact a general problem. I can think of very few American companies that are successful on a large scale and are able to introduce small-scale retail products or services. 

The exception has been 3M. On the other hand, 3M probably has hundreds more products they could have brought to market had the skills been in the company.

This is not a problem for large Japanese companies. It is in fact the main way that new products enter the market in Japan and it is the reason that there are so many products on the market in Japan. Some of those products are duplicated in the rest of the world after they succeed in Japan.

I merely point this out because we do not have an adequate institution to intermediate between the incredible line of products and services that are generated in our vast economic output and the entrepreneurial talent that is widespread in our society.

An example would be for a chamber of commerce to sponsor a public fair in which all large producers of products and services put them on display with appropriate technical descriptions and invited the public to look.

Evening of the arts

I love being in the city. I am an urban person.

As a lover of commerce at the time when urban areas are in the grip of a hostile Lefty ideological hysteria, I look at the list of arts, readings and events with great trepidation.

The problem for me is that most theater is focused on Lefty propaganda and the same is true for comedy, readings, public talks and poetry. Comics are 99% more likely to seek laughs about Sarah Palin than about Michelle Obama. Poetry is more likely to be about the oppression of some weak person or people than about the travails of existence.

I know this problem will pass. In the meantime the list of activities of interest in the city is limited, for me to the world of great novelty and subterranean innovation.

Jews in college

What a strange blog title.

It turns out that in my reading I find Jewish thinkers talking about the crisis that Jews encounter in their first year of college when the subject of their Jewishness becomes existential.

That did not happen to me. My Jewishness has periodically become an existential question unrelated to my age or my activities.

I have always known I am a Jew and I have never felt hostility to my ancestry. I have felt hostility to Jews who reject their fellow Jews.

The problem of Jews in college turns out to be simply the existential question of why a Jew should be or should not be a Jew. The number of answers is just short of infinity.

My answer is very straightforward and simple: a Jew is a person with a direct hands-on contact with the previous 3000 year history of the world. My ancestors were at everything of importance everywhere, from the founding of monotheisim to the revival of a 2,000 year old dead spoken language. They were in China 1400 years ago, in India, everywhere North of the Mediterranean and many places South. They came with Columbus to the New World.

I have in my genes the memory good, bad and indifferent of most human history. I welcome that direct connection to history and the world.

I am very fortunate.

No parking on Divisadero

You may wonder what this has to do with you as a reader of this blog or what it has to do with commerce.

The other night, I wanted to go to an event at a theater on Divisadero Street (San Francisco). This is a very up-and-coming neighborhood with every sign of life from coffee shops to bars to new restaurants to boutiques etc. I drove in a radius of three blocks in every direction and never found a parking space. I finally drove home.

When I mentioned my experience to other people I found that it is common in San Francisco for people to give up looking for a parking space to attend a performance or important event and go home.

San Francisco has an official policy that is hostile to automobiles. New buildings are prohibited from having more than 1.5 parking spaces for every three living units.  There are apartment buildings with 50 units and no parking spaces.

Bicycles and bicycle parking in parts of the city reduce the number of lanes for cars from four to two.  Successful anchor stores have been banned because they generate too much traffic (and focus on the needs of poor people.)  Taxis are unreliable and scarce.  Buses are inadeqate and dangerous.

The consequence of this anti-car atmosphere and general policy incompetence will be to stunt artistic and retail activities. While these activities may move to more dangerous and desolate neighborhoods where parking is viable, it will generally serve as a damper on creativity.

In neighborhoods where retail vitality is important, that vitality will be stifled unless parking buildings are constructed.

This is a perverse way in which anti-car sentiment ultimately makes city life less interesting and less desirable.

Arabs still produce the same

I have two points in history to compare. 2,000 BCE nd 2,000 CE.

In doing research on the history of money I looked at the earliest uses of money that are known. Apparently, the first uses were as bills of lading for furniture shipped from Damascus to Baghdad about four millenia ago.

One of my relatives spent a week in Damascus, not long ago, visiting friends and family. I asked about all the markets and buildings and food and life in Damascus.

It looks to me like Damascus only produces food and furniture as productive output.

It looks to me like Damascus is an example of the whole Arab world where the only productive output is directed at food and furniture. The food is the same throughout the Arab world but the furniture is a little different because the rest of the world also sells furniture to Arabs.

Somehow, there are academics and ideologues who think that the Arab world will be able to join the modern world easily. I don't. It is tribal and it is very stable over time.

Equality in the ER

The people in the Lefty world place equality higher than people in the non-lefty world.

We in commerce couldn't possibly elevate equality to a high status because any meritocratic system (commerce) will result in unequal outcomes.

Most defenders of unequal outcomes are not successful because the greed and envy of Lefties is not subject to understanding systemic benefits of a meritocracy.

I wish to suggest the opposite.  Any Lefty can understand this if they have even the rudiments of sympathy for their fellow human beings.

My example comes from the emergency rooms. It is axiomatic that everyone coming into an emergency room should be given equal access to medical treatment. I do not dispute this.

What I see coming out of the equality paradigm of the emergency room is a lesson for Lefties.  First, emergency rooms are forced to put priority on a filthy street drunk who comes in first with stroke symptoms over a pregnant woman who is bleeding in a vulnerable region. The drunk will be in a week later for another self-induced medical problem.

Second, the turnover among nurses and doctors dealing with ER is very high because it is very unpleasant to deal with the horrible mess of filthy street drunks.

Lastly, since the bottom class of our society has almost zero chance of making improvements in their lives or making subsequent positive contributions to society it is disturbing to force so much valuable resources on them.

The ER must operate on the basis of equality but it does not generate support for the idea that the larger society should use equality as a central principle.

Science is fiction

I wish to make a statement that will seem absurd to most of my wonderful and smart readers: most science is fiction.

This is not about fiction with science in it, which is called science-fiction.

I am saying that Newton's laws are fiction. For every action there is a reaction, equal and opposite is not a core truth of the universe. I am saying it is merely a satisfactory linguistic label to describe a wide range of experiments and actions.

Three things lead me to make this statement.  First, the American Physical Society signed on to a statement supporting human caused climate change. Few things in my mind could be more absurd.' Climate change' is a non sequitur. Change is measured by deviation from the mean: standard deviation is a mathematical construct. Not a living person has ever shown that the standard deviation of any climate mean is greater or lesser in the past millennia.

Second, the interest and excitement surrounding faster than light neutrinos found in Italay in the OPERA experiment is much too negligible for me.  It turns out that for 40 years there has been occasional experimental evidence that neutrinos have unusual attributes related to photons. What has happened is that one giant piece of technology,CERN, has brought quantum and Einsteinian theory into question.  Another piece of giant technology at Fermilab will do the experiment in a different form, MINOS.

This takes me to my main hypothesis: technology deals with the empiric world around us. Engineers build bridges and learn from the bridges that fall down. Engineers always build their products to be three times the strength theoretically needed because engineers inherently understand the limits of their knowledge. Three cheers for engineers.


Physics is the sequence of technical constructions and the numeric information that these technical instruments generate. Newton's theories came from Galileo's sloped wooden board that he used to measure the acceleration of gravity.

The third source of my perspective comes from a class that Niels Bohr taught in first year physics at the University of Chicago. My university. Bohr said that all physics was the explanation that connected constants. He proceeded to put a series of constants on the board, starting with g, the gravitational constant that was ultimately part of Newton’s theories.  He proceeded to list a dozen constants including Maxwell's and Hertz's.  He argued that all physics theory was simply the connection between the constants. We call those connections 'science'.

I go farther and suggest that it was the technology that finds the constants that is the only meaningful connection between our world and the emperic world we live in. We create fictional stories to connect these brilliant engineering feats.

Some may say that a great deal of this fictional creation involves math and is therefore less fictional. I have always been comfortable understanding that the universe of math is so large that science can always pick and choose an equation to fit the fiction. If Euclid's geometry is inadequate we can use non-Euclidean geometry.

Science is really fiction in the many languages and metaphors of math.

Indian action films

I have a wonderful friend who is Indian.  He has been giving me Indian films for a long time.

I am particularly delighted with Indian action films. Many are brilliantly shot and even more brilliantly choreographed. There are many that don't have Bollywood singing and dancing in them.

I began to wonder why these marvelous films are not shown in the United States in popular circuits.

I don't have an answer. I personally brought the Jimmy Cliff and other reggae films to the United States before the music became popular here. The films were only mediocre in quality but the music made them extraordinary and successful.

Audiences could barely understand the language, pidgin, just as they can barely understand the mixed English and Hindi of the Indian action films.

That doesn't seem to me to be a reasonable barrier.

Let's bring some Indian action films to the American foreign film theaters.

Commerce and corruption

I would like to say that commerce and corruption go together like love and marriage but love and marriage are not as closely connected as commerce and corruption.

The reason is straightforward. Commerce deals with supplying people with their desires. The entire world is organized around denying people their desires whether it is to be naked to have sex with anyone they see that is appealing or to act out their anger. Commerce deals with all of these as well as every other desire.

The world is organized to thwart human desire as well as the desire of many predators who target humans in the animal and plant world.

Most human desires have been brought under the roof of civilization and are provided to us as acceptable products and services in the market. But there is a large number of services and products that civilization has kept forbidden.

Commerce continues to deliver all products and services no matter what the penalties on the commercial supplier.  Since the taboo realm of products and services is constantly in flux (booze, cocaine, sodomy and horsemeat) over time and over geographic boundaries, commerce is always available to provide the taboos to the market.

Corruption deals with the small part of that spectrum from legal to horribly penalized that deals with illegal and marginally legal goods and services.

While we talk about corruption, it has no specific content. In some countries getting a phone line, getting your mail delivered or simply going from A to B requires a bribe.  In our country it is more likely to be the right to build a building or design some elements of the building that requires bribery.

Commerce is concerned only with delivering goods and services to the final buyer. If one is going to be killed for delivering the material, someone will do it. If a bribe has to be paid, someone will do it. It is impossible to separate commerce from corruption.

Thank goodness. I will always remember that the Arab boycott never kept anything out of Israel because commerce will always deliver.

Periodic table

I’m getting older and the periodic table tells me so.

Do you know many of the elements in the range from atomic number 62 to 71 or any of the ones past 108?

I didn’t. I had no idea about Gadolinium, Terbium or  Dysprosium and I have used the periodic table a great deal. As a young man, I could recite most of the materials up into the high 50s.

I don't hold myself responsible for knowing the unstable isotopes above 98 Californium.  

Did you know that there is a Dubnium 105, a Meitnerium 109, or a whole series that begin with Un as in Ununtrium 113?

Time to take a look and stay up-to-date.

App jobs

From the day I understood what apps were I realized there was a very large future industry. I became certain of it when Google offered a class in writing a simplified language for apps.

That day has arrived. There are tens of thousands of people making a living in the apps business.

What is so stunning about this business is that an individual can create their own business by combining modest academic skills with insight into human needs.

That tells me this will become a gigantic business category in a relatively short period of time.

If you have good ideas about how people spend their time, how they want to behave and what people dream about, you have the potential to start a new app business.

This is a wonderful new vista for the future.  More self employed people and more supplementary income for everyone else.

Racism

I am grateful to Duane Lesterfor putting together a list of all the accusations of racism leveled at critics of Pres. Obama by prominent black figures and black organizations.

Virtually no word or phrase of criticism of an incompetent, self-centered, mean president seems to go without accusing the critic of racism.

What does this mean?

It means two things to me.

First, it means that the Left that levels this charge and the media that convey it are the most racist bigots in America. Accusing someone falsely of racism is a disgraceful behavior and characteristic of the Left.

Second, it shows that a black president has brought out the most divisive racial elements in America. I am fully aware of the racism that was Jim Crow. I lived in Jim Crow country. But to suggest that that level of racism is current in our society indicates that the racial issue has been made worse by the election of a black president.

To understand my point, imagine a Muslim were elected president and every critic of the president was charged with anti-Islamic sentiment. The entire country would recognize that this divisiveness was dangerous and harmful.

That is precisely what the black president has created. He has done absolutely nothing to discourage it and everything to encourage it. He himself has let staff people around him use accusations of racism. He accused a Harvard professor of racism based on flimsy evidence. This man is a provocateur in the racial issue as well as the class war issue.

He is divisive in the extreme.

Len Canty

My regular readers know that I have been trying to find people in the black community who will help Americans understand the importance of next January 1, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's emancipation proclamation.

To my great delight and appreciation Len Canty, a friend of mine, and the people he works with understood the importance of this date and this issue.

The following is material that Len has published. I am certain it will lead to some celebration and appreciation for next January 1.

What political party for Lance?

 

What political party for Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens etc?

The issue about political party deals with one of the most disgusting political behaviors that an American can imagine. The government has stomped on specific individuals for imaginary problems.

This is precisely the reason we have the Bill of Rights. This is precisely the evil that government can generate. To use the power of the government to harass and oppress individuals for abstract, ungrounded and frivolous reasons is among the greatest sins of government.

That is precisely the consequence of a decade long hysteria about steroid use in sports. There is no federal law involving the use of steroids in sports and yet Congress and the Justice Department have mercilessly pursued individuals for their presumed use of steroids.

First, steroids do not move a person from average athlete to superior athlete. Second steroid use is a personal decision that is not illegal. Third, rules of fairness in sports are determined by the leagues for the individual sport association.

Back to my question. The persecution of athletes began in a Republican executive period and a Republican congressional period.  The Republican party is supposed to understand the malice of using government power to squash individuals. The Republican Party didn't pay attention to the Bill of Rights or the Constitution.  The Democrats never do.

So, who should these victims vote for in the future?

 

Ruth Bader hopeless

Originally when I did this blog I thought that Ruth Bader Ginsburg's talk about the failure of the American Constitution in Egypt was a niche item. Not true. All the big name talk radio shows covered the subject and demonstrated what a nincompoop she is.

My observations are different than any I have seen. I think she never had an original thought after age 23, she is just like the 99% of people I consider to be zombies. What she didn't learn and it is not taught anywhere, is what makes the US Constitution so superior to all constitutions written since then.

The US Constitution was based on two experiences and three thinkers. The two experiences were several hundred years of British common law, as it had interacted with the British Parliament and the 125 years of the Dutch Republic. The three thinkers were Locke, Hobbes and Adam Smith.

All subsequent constitutions were based on the thinking of left wing incompetents.  The most influential incompetent was Jew hating Karl Marx who spent his life in a library in London writing in German. I have pointed out that Jew haters are incompetent thinkers because paranoia destroys their ability to think.

As a consequence the U.S. Constitution was based on substantial human experience and the three greatest thinkers on politics in human history.

Additionally, the wisdom of hundreds of politically astute men added to the Constitution with their demand for the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is probably the most insightful contribution to humanity in the world of politics and personal freedom.

Ruth Ginsburg fails to understand or even recognize that significance. It is hard to blame that pathetic cripple.  Nobody has been teaching this subject the way I described it and her mind stopped working when she was 23 and locked into outmoded Lefty ideology.

The branding illusion

 

More than a decade ago people in advertising began to realize that advertising was a sham and nearly ineffective on almost all potential customers. The success of Rasberry's and my book (Marketing Without Advertising) helped the process along. With the advent of Google it became obvious that advertising was ineffective but listing, in the form of click through notices was the most effective form of marketing.

That was about the time that every advertising agency created a branding department. Branding was the answer to the failure of advertising to do anything useful. Branding was presumably accomplished by massive ad campaigns that generated some form of loyalty to a brand.

This is of course another sham just like advertising itself. Since some of my readers don't know the distinction between advertising and other forms of marketing I make two distinctions. Listing is the most important form of marketing it is having your information where your customer is looking for it, whether it is the sign on the front of your building, your name in an alumni publication or online Yellow Pages.  Marketing also includes publicity which is again information put in a location likely to be read or seen by potential customers.

Now back to branding. Branding does not require advertising. Branding is best understood by the products that you love at your grocery stores, your hardware stores and pharmacies that are not national brands. Most major retailers now take common products, generic in the main meaning of that word, and they put their own brand on it. I use Safeway's brand of yogurt, I use Costco's brand of olive oil and I use a dozen brands from Trader Joe's, none of which are national advertised brands, all of which are better than the national advertised brand versions.

That should tell you what branding is about. Put your brand on a superior product and people will find it. Advertising is 100% irrelevant to brands as you can see from the many generic brands that we all use.

 

Imaginary taxes

There may be something called imaginary taxes. That is not what I propose to discuss.

What I propose to discuss is the idea of taxes that my lefty friends hold dearly. They seem to live with the conception that taxes have no effect on people, corporations or behavior.

With complete abandon, Democrats propose increasing taxes on a wide range of objects from cigarettes to income and presume little or no effect. These taxes are what I call imaginary taxes.

In every case that I have ever looked at taxes, I find they have effects.  Sometimes large sometimes small. State income taxes drive out wealthy people if the taxes are sufficiently progressive. They also create highly volatile state revenue because people in the top income tier have volatile income.

Cigarette taxes do not punish cigarette producers. They are direct taxes on poor people who are disproportionately smokers. Taxes on cigarettes make poor people poorer.

Whenever people can escape taxes by moving or changing their behavior they do. Taxes are not imaginary, despite everything lefties and Democrats try to make people believe.

Furthermore, the incidence of taxes is never obvious and often perverse. A tax increase of any sort should be short-term and subject to careful research about the outcome and incidence.

Addendum: the latest Democrat proposal last week that a reproductive insurance burden can be passed from anyone (churches) to an insurance company shows serious contempt for Americans' intelligence.

 

Chairman and CEO

I am beginning to hear talk about the need to separate corporate chairman of the board from the position of chief executive officer.

I have strongly advocated such separation for 40 years. The reason is simple. The two functions are different and usually in conflict.

The chairman of the board is responsible for the operation of the board and the board itself is responsible to shareholders for the operation of the corporation. The board must be the entity that chooses and determines the compensation for the chief executive officer.

These are two distinctly separate functions. In the past 20 years they have been conflated and we have gotten hundreds of the top corporations where the title is Chairman and CEO.  As a consequence we have gotten executive compensation that is disconnected from the performance of executives.

I think we would have a better chance of controlling executive compensation that is disconnected from performance if we begin by separating the function of chairman of the board from the function of chief executive officer.

Gay marriage in old age and pre-nups

 

I hear many arguments in favor of gay marriage and a few in opposition. The strongest opposing argument I hear deals with polygamy.

The argument I never hear, is that gay marriage might work. By 'might work' I mean that gay marriage might have the stability, 50%, of straight marriages.

To me the most powerful benefit of marriage is the pairing and general caring of older married pairs.

Care for the elderly is a vital and costly element in our society. Anything that provides care for the elderly should be given serious consideration.

Additionally, I never hear any discussion of the need for prenups, pre-nuptial agreements, in connection with civil unions. Why? A civil union in California is identical to a marriage. In both cases, the absence of a prenup, means all property acquired during the period of the civil union is joint property.

In more than a few cases I know of gays in a relationship where one has a great deal of money and income and the other has little or none. So, the absence of discussion about prenups strikes me as a serious social failing.

 

My identity naked

I live in the Castro, gay, district of San Francisco. In the past year we have had a fluorescence of naked men. We have also had supervisorial legislation drawing attention to nakedness in public.

So, not surprisingly I saw three naked people walking the street the other day. Two men and a woman in their 20s. All three had pubic hair. An observation I make because I only see the pubic hair of the men in the shower where I swim. Porn video that I see suggests widespread shaving of pubic hair. I don't know.... that is why I mentioned it.

The reason for this blog is that I think people have a visual conception of themselves. Some are probably naked in this vision, others are in various states of dress and a variety of clothing.

My self image is in a photograph of me in my 30's running in shorts in Golden Gate Park.

I clearly see myself as nearly naked. What about you?

The most important right

 

The following blog was originally one of my Monday original ideas that I posted over the past two and half months. But I could not see how certain it was a unique idea to me. The other 11 ideas were byproduct of unique experiences that I had. I was also uniquely able to distill important observations from my experience.

While this seems to me to be an original and important idea, I'm not so confident. Here it is without my certainty that it is my original idea.

For all individuals and peoples, self-defense is the core human right. It underlines and is a priori to all other rights.

This right is not self evident. It is the right that underlies all of the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution, regularly called the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights is a meta-cover for the core right of self-defense. It includes the freedom to act and believe as an individual and seek redress for problems, to keep arms to have privacy rights, to have legal protection against the state in a personal sense and at a governmental level. The Bill of Rights restrains the government and society in which the individual lives.

The simplest evidence that this is a core principle is that wives and slaves never had the right to self-defense.

The personal and family right to self-defense is somewhat restrained by the circumstances under which it can be exercised. The intent of the attacker should be clearly evident, the means and opportunity of the attacker should be similarly evident. Self-defense is further moderated by the response of the defendant who should avoid excessive destruction, if possible.  

A nation has similar rights and I have written about this here.

 

Occupy and Jim Jones

 

What is the connection between the Occupy movement and Jim Jones?

Jim Jones was the radical lefty Minister who took 900 parishioners to their suicidal death with him.

I knew Jim and I followed his escapades for four or five years in San Francisco from the time he arrived until he left for Guyana.

The connection between the Occupy movement and Jim Jones is so strong, so blatant and so obvious that every Lefty will deny it.

Jim Jones was the darling of the elected San Francisco political elite. They adored him. He was an outspoken lefty with a 5000 person devoted following who would vote exactly as Jim direct them to. Jim was appointed to two commissions and the belle of the ball wherever he went.

Every single Democratic leader in America, no exceptions, sang praises and hallelujahs to the Occupy movement everywhere it sprung up.  They broke the law about camping in city parks and no Democrat in America suggested that they be moved. They were filthy and poorly behaved but they seem to fulfill the wet dreams of every political lefty. They had no agenda but anger.

This says to me that the Left now and in the past has absolutely no new, valuable or desirable policy perspectives for the world.  Democrats cling to anything that appears to appeal to Lefty angst.

 

The battle of commerce

My wonderful readers already know that the battle of commerce was fought in the 20th century between many central planning schemas and the few non-planning societies. All of the central planning systems failed miserably. All of the failures resulted in mass murder, starvation or sheer misery as we have in Cuba today.

But the triumph of commerce is often disputed.

The success of China is not a Democratic success. The great successes of Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are attributed to cultural superiority of those specific Asians.  The turnaround of India is offset by the sad failure of the current post-Soviet Union.

There is one pure case. There is one democracy that operated wholeheartedly on the Soviet, union-dominated economy and carefully switched to an open market commerce.

That pure example is Israel from its founding days as a perfect model of a Soviet union dominated economy (with all political leaders looking to their personal experience in the USSR) with a union dominated labor party (Mapam) running the government until the mid-1960s.

From the mid-1960s until the late 1970s the labor party began selling large government industries to private parties. From the late 1970s onward, a market oriented party (Likud) began and continued selling industries but broke up the industries into more functional less union style entities.

The data from Israel is not perfect because the slow growth in the early 80s (1% over 5 years) and the modest growth of personal income in the late 80s (60% over 5 years) has to be contrasted with the extraordinary growth in the first half of the 90s (77% over 5 years) and the astounding growth in the last half of the 90s (90% over 5 years) The 90s were a period of massive immigration from the Soviet Union.

Ordinarily immigration is a drain on society, but the Russian Jews were highly educated and ready to assimilate into the society rapidly. Rapid growth continued to this day with high growth rates throughout the first decade of the 2000's (88% in the first 5 years and 78% in the second 5 years).

Israel is a pure case of the success, triumph, of commerce for all who have an open mind and the eyes to see reality.

Slippery unemployment numbers

Don't get too excited about unemployment numbers. They are very slippery when you look at the details. To know the unemployment rate that is reported by the Bureau of Labour Statistics there are several numbers to keep in mind.

Start off with the drop down from 9.3% to 8.3% unemployment in the past year, that is a change of 1,300,000 people. The definition of unemployed is simple. Did you look for a job in the previous four weeks if you were 16 years of age or older. If yes, did you have a job in the week that is considered the key week of the month. Most months, that is the second week.

All of this data is seasonally adjusted. That means that for December most people are seasonally adjusted to not be looking for a job and those who have jobs are assumed to include many Christmas only workers.  Slippery data.

Did these 1.3 million people get jobs? That answer depends on several other numbers.

At present, there are roughly 141.6 million workers. Of these, 8 million work part time jobs and and another 9 million were government employees. That excludes the military.

In the past year the number of workers has gone up by slightly more than 2 million. So how did we get two million more workers when only 1.3 million were formerly unemployed?

There is a group of people called the labor force. In January of this year there were 154.4 million of these. A year ago there were only 153.3 million. So that is 1.1 million new people who entered the labor force. The definition of the labor force is people who have a job or who are looking for a job.

The number of employed people increased by 2.3 million in the past year, of which 1.3 million were formerly unemployed and 1 million were formerly out of the labor force. Note that these numbers are for a gigantic data set. It only left out 0.1 million people in the final data.

So where do those 1.1 million new entrants to the labor force come from?

They come from the pool of possible workers which constitutes all Americans over age 16. It excludes a few million in jail or prison, in the Army, or in senior living and hospital environments. It therefore includes my friend Herman who is 84 and was capable, maybe, of working last year.  In January of this year it excluded Herman because senility put him in a senior care home.

During the past year the possible worker pool increased from 238.7 million to 242.3 million. That is 4.4 million people. That includes people who just turned 16 during the year or became citizens. 

Which means, 3.3 million have defined themselves as potential workers but who are not working and who are not unemployed by existing definitions.

That 3.3 million people has the potential to mess up our figures. They could look for a job and increase unemployment data. They could get jobs without being ever unemployed and make the unemployment data look better.

There is room for slippery numbers in this structure. We should always allow unemployment data a few months to stabilize in order to understand what is happening in the labor market.

Smart and smarter

 

I couldn't be happier. The Chicago Booth school of business has put together a panel of forty outstanding economists and periodically gets their opinion on issues of public policy.

The object is to pick issues where the professional economics community is likely to be in agreement in order to teach the public the core issues of economics.

This is of importance to me because I spent two years in economics graduate school at UC Berkeley. I know that economists have come to many logical conclusions using the rigorous and mathematical tools of economics. Most of these rigorous conclusions are important in public policy and are badly misunderstood by the public.

People like Paul Krugman do not represent economics they are pure 19th Century lefty ideologues.

The availability of this expert panel, and the decision to emphasize core understandings in the economics profession is an important step forward in the intellectual world.

When I have discussions with ordinary citizens I find they are ignorant of rudimentary economic truths and empirical evidence. For example the gold standard was a mechanism for communicating depressions and recessions throughout the world, but it's worst problem was that discoveries of new gold and exhaustion of old fields resulted in inflation and deflation. There are plenty of Ron Paul supporters who don’t know this.

There are dozens of other issues on which economists agree. Check it out

 

I lived to see it

I have joked for many years that I will not live to see most of my ideas appreciated.

Here is evidence that at least one of my major ideas is coming to fruition in a mere 35 years.

The use of random citizens for public policy making was proposed by me in the mid-1970s. I have written about it often and co-wrote the first book on the subject.

It looks like, California will have an initiative this year, based on three days of deliberation by 410 randomly selected Californians.

Last year we had our elective districts designed by a random selection of citizens on a small committee. It was a small step in the right direction. We now have a giant step in the right direction.

I'm not planning to die soon, but what I see around me is the complete success of a harebrained idea that I had when I was a very young man.

India investment issues

Don't be discouraged by the perpetual bad business climate news that comes out of India.

India and Indians are perpetually looking back to their socialist, pro-Russia days.

The caste system inherently prejudices Indians against successful business people.

Business did not begin to thrive in India because of any government policies. It began despite government controls. It thrives, as it often does in the United States where government is weak or corrupt, because commerce is much like a weed in its early stages.

I went to Bangalore in the early 1990s, just as call-centers were entering the market. Bangalore had no new buildings, there were barefoot streets and an airport designed mostly for single engine planes. Businesses were springing up because of a good telecom cable to Singapore. Businesses were providing their own new work spaces and living communities with clean water and their own power supplies.

This is how business began and expanded all over India. Despite government efforts to shut it down.

Commerce can thrive with hard-working employees, intelligent people and an environment that is malleable because of corruption.

That is the real India.

Real old age issues

Thirty years ago I wrote a book Simple Living Investments for Old Age. The book is available as an e-book.

I emphasize in the book the importance of having young friends and the many ways an older person could be appealing to young people.

I stick by that prescription. But there are several elements of old age that I did not reasonably anticipate.

First, technology changes more rapidly than I conceived and the changes are fundamental to a comfortable participatory life. I now have many friends who are severely restricted in their ability to participate in life because they cannot use e-mail, smart phones and complex household equipment.

Second, I did not see how extensively all our social and commercial networks would decay.  As other people retire and as they find their own social networks atrophying, it becomes increasingly difficult to call a friend and get something done in the way we did it decades earlier. A politician in DC, in old age can't phone his buddy in Memphis to see how the political winds are blowing. The friend no longer has her useful contacts.

Third, business and related functions change so rapidly it is hard to fit in. The workplace today is radically different from the workplace decades ago. It is very informal.  To understand our interaction with businesses, bureaucrats and colleagues requires significant learning about the new environment.

Lastly, what becomes so important to us, our identity, is invested in grandchildren and stories about our lives. Young people are decidedly uninterested in our experiences unless we are extraordinary storytellers. They are focused on the future, on their own future and it is hard for them to see how our antiquated experience relates to their new world.

I would have to modify my book significantly to incorporate these new reservations.

Lifetime employment

 

I had somewhat of an epiphany on the subject of lifetime employment in government.

The issue crossed my mind as I was struggling with the fact that government employees in San Francisco and on a federal basis are paid astronomic wages and benefits.

I was trying to add the value of lifetime employment to the estimated package of benefits. While thinking about it, it crossed my mind that lifetime employment is necessary for bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats, after only a few years on the job, are unemployable outside of a bureaucracy.

We have millions, 3 million federal, 6 million other government bureaucrats who could never get a job if they left or were forced out of the government bureaucracy.

Simply ask yourself the question: 'Would you hire a bureaucrat for a job that requires hard work and genuine effort?'  My answer is ‘no’.

Therefore, bureaucrats need lifetime employment. I cannot value lifetime employment because it has no real market value... it is a protection against the market.