Pro Commerce

Anti-fragile

I recently read Nassim Talib’s book Anti-fragile.  I am not going to connect this blog reference to Amazon where you can buy the book because I found the book to be a waste of my money.

The book was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani who explains why it is so unreadable. It is merely a good article added to a very long rant.

Talib’s thesis is original and imaginative. He argues that our society and we as individuals are constantly barraged by unknowable large disruptions and shocks.

We try to cope with these shocks by making our objects and institutions more robust. He says robust is the wrong direction to go … anti-fragile is right.

By anti-fragile he means that new shocks and stresses should enhance the response rather than result in damage and harm. We all have the 2008 stock market crash in mind.

The most vivid institutional form of anti-fragility is evolution. Humans gain bone and muscular strength from stress and constant use. Our antibody system also gains effectiveness by exposure to stress and shock.  The modern use of vaccines is an antifragile solution.

We have a few institutions that benefit from stress and shock. The prime example is  the NTSB, the agency that investigates airplane accidents and introduces air safety improvements.  The safety record of airlines has been steadily improving for a century.

In the instance of automobile safety, the initial improvements came from technological change in the automobiles. The remaining improvements occurred because state legislatures began changing the driving requirements for people from age 16 to 21. In my lifetime automobile deaths have dropped to one third.

Anti-fragile is a very interesting and important concept. You now know it so be grateful to Talib and think more about it on your own.

Fibonacci and Florence

Master of Dominican Effigies

This month I saw the show about painters and artists from 12th century Florence at the Los Angeles Getty. It was a spectacular show and convinced me that my Old Friend Charlie (who often comments on this blog) was right. Modern commerce began in Florence in the late 11th century.

Prosperity resulting from trade and commerce are what frequently generate art. Florence must have been a rich flourishing city based on the incredibly high level and extraordinary quality of the art I saw.

The reason Old Friend Charlie located the beginning of modern commerce in Florence in the late 11th century is because that is where Fibonacci first published his book on multiplication. The book sold widely and was the core tool that permitted business people to calculate percentages and interest rates.

There is also evidence that double entry bookkeeping was in use in Florence at this time. One example was the Giovanino Farolfi Company whose books show evidence of credits and debits.

With business people able to do multiplication and double entry bookkeeping I am convinced that Florence is the location for the inception of modern commerce. The shipping port for Florence is Pisa.

I highly recommend the Florence exhibit at the Getty.

Prejudge dangerous people

There was one solution to the Sandy Hook tragedy that I never heard mentioned.

I believe it is possible to identify dangerous people, both teenagers and adults long before they become a threat to society.

I have many teachers in my family and among my friends. Especially those who have worked with young children, are quite willing to admit that they can identify psychopaths at an early age.

They are almost universally convinced that the behavior of the child who is a psychopath and a future danger to society is readily detectable to most teachers.

To my knowledge, no one has attempted to figure out how such observations could be turned into a functional social instrument.

I know that in Japan, where I have observed children under six in large groups, that children up until that age have been leading lives of almost unrestricted freedom.

The Japanese approach seems to be to use this period to develop and expose the child's character. I assume the purpose was to help create workable marriages later in the person's life by making appropriate matches. Something feasible in a small community.

I have no idea how the Japanese deal with a psychopath. But since there seem to be so few adult psychopaths I assume that these children get intense care and focus to generate appropriate socialization.

I would not trust our society to make records of young kids who are psychopaths.  Teachers may not be reliable, the mechanism for correcting errors in the transcript may not be reliable and no one should face a life of prejudgment.

Nevertheless, I do think the subject warrants consideration and discussion.

Backdating a PC computer

One of the most fascinating and brilliant elements of my PC computer is the ability to backdate the computer in time.

Even with the blue screen of death I was able to restart the computer and backdate it.

What backdating means is that you can select an earlier date, in my case a week earlier, and set the computer to begin at that point. All new programming languages that were added after that earlier date are deleted. This gets rid of any viruses that were installed. The backdating does not have any effect on text you have written.

I wish other institutions and objects had this extraordinary capability. We would happily apply it to human relations after an argument. It would be wonderful if it applied to automobiles that have recently broken down.

The fact that I can actually backdate my computer is a fascinating and powerful metaphor.

Gun control

Again, this is a delayed comment about a highly controversial subject... weeks late.

On the gun control issue there are three separate elements. Gun control is a subset of crime. Is gun control possible? What about the second amendment?

Crime seems to be a purely cultural matter. Virtually no crime in Japan. Very low crime among whites, Asian and Latinos in the U.S.. Very high crime rates among male black Americans under 30.

What do we really know about crime?

1) Parenting of black children by single mothers is a major source of black male crime. 2) In the 1990s three strikes laws putting perennial criminals in prison was very effective in reducing crime. 3) Income does not correlate with crime so social welfare giveaways are irrelevant (they don’t work anyway). 4) Nothing suggests that gun control is relevant to the issue of crime.

Is gun control possible in the United States?  Maybe over a century. There are so many guns the issue deals with an impossibility.

I had a wife who was an extreme Lefty lawyer and a major force in prison reform. She always said: 'The second amendment is very clear English. If you don't like it, change it.'

Nobody is likely to change the 2nd amendment in our lifetime.  It requires 3/4ths of the states to ratify a new amendment.

The Supreme Court for the first time took up the issue in a Washington DC case in 2008 and ruled on the 2nd amendment as a core right. We are now on track for the courts to allow virtually unlimited possesion of guns by private individuals. Some registration, training and limitation on types of arms may be constitutional.

What more is there to say about gun control? I can't see how this will impact, open-carry  or concealment. Some states will have it others won't.

Measurements have not been reliable on punishment enhancements for crimes with guns, but I suspect they work and could be refined.  Punishment enhancements are irrelevant to mass killings which are a subset of crimes of passion.

Homeless phones and dogs

The California Public Utilities Commission is considering requiring wireless phone carriers to provide low income and homeless people with the same low cost fees as land lines currently get. It would join with an Obama program to provide free phones.

The assumption is that these are people who are looking for jobs and need to stay in touch with potential employers, social welfare agencies and families.

It doesn't really matter what the assumptions are.

In the early 80's I provided free answering services to homeless families via the main San Francisco family homeless agency. Answering service box numbers with their own telephone access and private storage were inexpensive.(Homeless families are less than less than 2% of the homeless population.)

Despite an aggressive campaign to make sure every one of the several hundred homeless people knew about the option for an answering service ..... a few people tried it and no one ended up using it.

Don't count on the statewide utility agency to care whether their program will fail or simply be used for fraud. The utility regulators never follow up on their programs.

In the same vein, San Francisco is giving dogs to homeless people on the assumption that most homeless people need company and so do the dogs.

So far in the past week I have been offered two sweet little dogs for one dollar each by homeless people.

No document loans

I know that my blog would have many more readers if I commented on current issues.

My problem is that I tend to think about issues over a few days or weeks before I feel comfortable commenting. I apologize. What more can I say?

This lead in is because a few weeks ago the news carried the issue of widespread attacks on the practice called: 'no document loans.'  Such loans were common in the 15 years before the housing bubble burst. They were even more common in the San Francisco Bay area.

I didn't comment on it at the time because I assumed that most readers would discount the naïveté of the attacks on such loans. As time went by it became obvious that these attacks on no document loans were being made by people ignorant of their function.

No document loans were made to small business people and independent self employed. All of us such people file a schedule C tax return that shows virtually no net income despite whatever our gross income may be.

Bankers and lenders are completely incapable of understanding a schedule C tax return and estimating actual disposable income. Disposable income is necessary to make loan payments on a mortgage. It is much easier to understand a salaried tax return.

The no document loans were based on a 20% down payment on property that was in a rising market and seemed safe. It was the only option available to lenders who are unable to understand the taxes and finances of the millions of self-employed and small business population.

So when you hear the term no document loans, you should think favorably about them because they allow the self employed and people with small businesses to buy homes.

Commerce and violent crime

Violent crime including murder has been on a long downward trend throughout history. This is one of the early articles calling attention to that fact.

The most rapid decline in violence both domestic and internationally has come in the past two centuries.

On an international level, the peak was half a century ago and the decline has been very rapid. It coincides with rapidly growing international trade.

On the domestic level crime rate and violent crimes have been decreasing steadily for 200 years which parallels the rapid rise of industrial commerce.

Think about the story of Romeo and Juliet. Two families at war. Think about the modern Arab and African world where family warfare continues unabated.

When someone has to either sell you something or get a job, both required in a commercial society, that person has to learn to cooperate with strangers. That is commerce and that is the reason for the socialization by our society that has the side benefit of decreasing interpersonal crime.

Of course some people get jobs with the government. They nevertheless need some socialization that has the side benefit of decreasing violent crime.

When you give thanks at dinner for your food at Christmas tonight and tomorrow, it may also be worthwhile being thankful to commerce for the relatively safe and peaceful society we live in. If you live in one of the most dangerous cities in America, you are highly aware that there is very little commerce in your city.

Wise king hypothesis

Throughout my life I have heard people make a comment to the effect that the ideal government would be a wise king.

This is often offered as an example of the person's dissatisfaction with the problems of democracy and their own display of wisdom.

It is not.

The idea of the wise king is flawed for two obvious reasons and no intelligent person should make a statement about it.

First we have never found a way to have multiple generations of wise leaders under any circumstances nor under any historic conditions. No such system exists nor has it ever existed.  So choosing a wise king would be a very short-term solution to anything.

Second and most importantly, the best decisions in a  complex modern society are made by individuals at the individual level in the system we know as commerce.

Insofar as any form of governance can imitate commerce and allow individuals to make as many autonomous decisions as possible, that will be good government.

Saint Peter at the gate

You probably have an image of St. Peter standing on clouds behind the podium with a big book talking to people who are entering heaven.

Where does this image come from?

First of all it is clearly Christian because it has St. Peter, it has heaven as something in the sky and it has a concept of rewards after death for good behavior. All signs of Christianity.

I am struck by the image because it is really quite old.

In Roman theology Janus controlled the entry to heaven and Peter is clearly at the same rank among angels as Janus was.

The more I think about this image the more I wonder how it continues to be perpetuated. It is primarily perpetuated in cartoons but cartoons represent a legitimate conception of how human beings are judged for their earthly behavior.

I think that this image is persistent and influential because most people have an internal moral compass that is in constant operation throughout the day. That moral compass is too difficult to focus on or think about.

The solution is to have this humorous image of St. Peter as the judge. The judge is clearly not God, which allows for a sense of discretion and consideration when it comes to evaluating moral behavior.

I was just thinking about this.

Artist as big earners

Most of my life I have been exposed to the popular thesis that artists are invariably poor and unfairly at the bottom of society.

It is not uncommon to hear the same people demanding government support for the arts.

Beginning in the 1960s there were many living visual artists who were earning substantial amounts of money: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Calder and Serra.

Today, there are visual artists who earn regularly in the millions of dollars even some worth a billion.

There is San Francisco woman sculptor, age 31, who has been getting commissions of over $70,000.

There are several reasons why living visual artists are able to earn so much money. First is the incredible expansion of the auction market to include living visual artists.

Second is the dearth of good investments with a reasonable return. Since nouveau riche are anxious to prove their high level of taste and display their extraordinary earnings, the art market has become a great place to put their money.

The Chinese are also entering the market under the same circumstances with abundant money, desperate need for return and recognition. Often they are buying living Chinese visual artists.

If you are an artist, be prepared to be rich. And stop complaining about the absence of government funding for the arts.

Singapore version of China

There is incessant chatter about the instability of the Chinese government.

I am continually expected to listen to wise opinion that tells me that the Chinese government is potentially unstable

I wish I could ask these experts to explain how Singapore has remained stable for 50 years and shows no signs of instability.

Singapore is Chinese and has been in the modern world, where Singaporeans can travel the planet freely. Singapore is obviously much smaller and more economically homogeneous but it does not have much of a political democracy.

I would cite Singapore as an example of a country with semi-democratic practices that is culturally Chinese and has been very stable.

With Singapore as my example I find experts who worry about Chinese instability to be unreasonably alarmist.

What people tell themselves

During political campaigns the standard procedure to develop policy statements is to test it on a focus group (roughly a dozen people) who are identified as independent voters.

I would not do campaigns, that can afford focus groups, this way.

I would ask my core party constituency to answer a number of questions. The questions would be how you justify your own parties’ position on such and such issues.

For example I would ask most Republicans how they justify the Republican Party denying the validity of legal abortions when nearly all Republicans support keeping abortions legal.

I would ask most Democrats how they justify the Democratic party's complete subservience to labor unions when nearly no Democrats would ever join a union.

It is the answers to these questions that will allow voters to cross party lines.

For example most Republicans know that abortion has been a dead legislative issue for many decades and abortions will be legal no matter who is elected.

Most Democrats would say unions are a declining institution of no particular importance. Therefore it is easy to ignore the union's role in the Democratic Party.

There are at least half a dozen issues on both sides that the adamant partisans are able to dismiss because they have explanations similar to the ones above.

In a campaign, these explanations need to be used openly to allow others to cross party lines.

Talk radio and comedians

There is a reason why talk radio is a bastion of conservatism and TV comedy is pure Left-wing ideology.

On the simplest level conservatives are happy people who enjoy the stimulus of people talking to them about a wide range of ideas. The more complex the ideas the more interesting and convivial the conversation.

Comedians on the other hand help lighten the burden of unhappiness that sits on the shoulders of most Lefties.

A more complex explanation is that the conservative world is made up of many different clusters of ideas ranging from social issues where the status quo and tradition are important to parts of difficult moral issues and commercial issues where trade, business and regulatory issues present complex problems. That complex environment creates a world in which an interesting radio voice can make comments and arguments interesting enough to fill three hours a day and five days a week with very little staff support.

Comedians on TV deal with almost the exact opposite. The Lefty orthodox line is published almost daily in the New York Times, the Huffington Post and the Doonesbury cartoon strip. Therefore comedians have common enemies and simple themes about which to construct jokes. Their staff begins each meeting with a set of enemies, pre-ordained policy positions and an audience that will always agree with the underlying ideology.

That is why talk radio is conservative and comedy TV is Lefty.

Bush’s fault?

I have spent more than a month trying to figure out how an arrogant, egotistical, mean-spirited, incompetent has been reelected to the presidency following the worst economic four years since WWII.

I have the answer and it is tragically simple. I have asked many people why they voted for the man who brought them the worst economic environment in more than half a century.

The answer is always the same: 'the economy was Bush's fault'.

Unfortunately a very intelligent person would not have enough information to understand how wrong such a statement is. The Romney campaign never even tried to demonstrate that the worst four years were caused by Obama and strictly Obama and his veto proof Congress.

Here is the problem. There are two charts on this page. One shows recoveries of GDP for the post 1930 recessions (including the Great Depression). The Obama recovery is the worst. The other chart shows unemployment recoveries since 1960. Obama's employment recovery is the worst.

Only a few million people are capable of reading these charts if the charts were ever presented to them.

Even those few million would not understand that an independent agency, called the National Bureau of Economic Research has been measuring recessions for the entire postwar period.  The NBER calls the beginning and ending of every recession and it has been universally accepted in the economic and financial worlds.

So the data in these charts is based on accurate numbers beginning with the point that the NBER defines as the end of the recessionary downturn and the beginning of the recovery.

The data in these charts is too hard for most people to understand and much too hard for them to comprehend at the level of reliability.

The financial crash in 2008 wasn’t caused by the Bush administration it was a housing bubble caused by several factors but mostly Fannie and Freddie who were protected by Democrats Barney Frank and Chris Dowd.

Financial crashes have occurred in many countries and the economic recoveries afterward were no different than ordinary business cycle recessions.

The stimulus package of 2009 was counter-productive and made the economy worse as did the regulatory uncertainty and the rule flaunting undemocratic Congress. Obama and the Democratic Party created a horrible recession that drove the median income down for the first time in 70 years.

It wasn't stupid people or ignorant people who elected the man responsible for the worst economic recovery in 60 years. They simply couldn't understand the data in the form that is available online and in financial newspapers.

MSG

Many decades ago it was explained to me the monosodium glutamate in Chinese food would create negative reactions in my body.

I found that MSG did precisely that. After eating in Chinese restaurants I always had sharp prickly tingling in the back of my neck.

Recently, my son told me that MSG was not harmful and had no harmful effects.

So I did a double blind study. I had my beloved live-in partner put Accent on a variety of dishes when I wasn't looking. For two weeks during which time she did this I never noticed anything unusual.

I was duped by an urban legend for many years of my life. Not a big loss but a loss nevertheless.

Pro commerce heaven

How do you get into the pro-commerce heaven and what will keep you out?

What gets you in is supporting political activity that encourages diversity in the broadest sense of the word, meritocracy, openness and open markets.

If you have run your own business and loved what you were doing you are automatically accepted into the pro-commerce heaven. If you have supported a person or persons who started or ran their own business you are welcome into the pro-commerce heaven.

You will also be welcomed if you have done everything possible to restrain government power (in a stable society) and encouraged business everywhere including foreign trade and technological innovation.

You will not get into pro-commerce heaven if you supported labor union values that are antithetical to merit. You will not get in if you encouraged more government and more control of business.

You will definitely not get into pro-commerce heaven if you hated big business, chain stores, international trade, and actively opposed these sources of prosperity.

It is questionable whether you could get in to the pro-commerce heaven if you used zoning or permit processes to make life difficult for businesses.

The pro-commerce heaven is the place for happy, imaginative and interesting people. The ones who are turned away may include many movie stars but they are pretty unpleasant as human beings in person.

Political fund raisers

Well over $1 billion was raised in the most recent campaign by each party and their super PACs.  

I have never been much of a fund raiser.  In fact I have been a failure at it which is why I am able to understand why others succeed. I have managed fundraisers and fundraising campaigns while not personally hitting up any donor.

Fund raising for anything is always the same. A genuine effort must be made to include the donor in an appropriate social circle.

I know several donors to Democratic party campaigns. The most distinctive characteristic of my Democratic donor friends is that they are socially awkward and lack any inclusive social circle.

This is especially true for Silicon Valley nerds... a great source of funding for the Democratic party.  The reason is simple. These nerds have no friends and no real social networks. By giving money to the Democratic Party they are invited to many parties where they meet other nerds who have money and consider themselves peers.  Democratic Party fund raisers create a social circle for rich nerds.

Since this is a desperate need on the part of rich Silicon Valley nerds, the Democratic Party has been very successful.

Republicans are comfortable, emotionally stable people who have functional social networks and this element of fundraising is not necessary. Just bring Republican friends together in their own existing networks and they make donations.

4 wheel drive

I believe blog writers are entitled to some degree of silliness.

This is my silly blog.

Many people in urban areas are driving cars with four-wheel drive.

That's fine. I am sure that some tiny percent actually use the four-wheel drive when going to snow country or remote locations.

What strikes me about all people who seem to have four-wheel drives is that few if any understand what the four-wheel drive is all about.

Near me is a sloped dirt street with gravel and it becomes somewhat slippery after rains in San Francisco.

It is quite common for me to find people on this dirt street stuck spinning their wheels in a four-wheel drive vehicle.

They clearly do not know that two axles and four wheels deliberately engaged together are intended to generate distributed power for driving stability in snow, slippery streets, slippery roads and gravel.

How will these people ever learn what four-wheel drives are about? They won't.

It is possible they would learn if some major auto manufacturer explained it in their incessant and ubiquitous TV ads. I don't expect to see that happen.

In the meantime you have my pathetic rant.

City Creek mall

On a recent visit to Salt Lake City I saw the finest shopping mall on the planet. It is called City Creek and it is in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City on Mormon property. Consequently all of the stores are closed on Sunday.

It must be a very successful mall for Nordstrom's and Macy's, the two ostensible anchor stores to be closed on Sunday. The real anchor stores are Apple and the Cheesecake Factory (which is off premises and open on Sunday). The two hot stores these days are Forever 21 and American Eagle.

What makes a great mall? My opinion is based on the second most impressive mall which is in Jerusalem, Mamilla. And the third greatest mall is in San Jose: Santana Row.

Each of these malls takes advantage of urban attributes such as walkable streets, tall buildings and extraordinary design.

City Creek has a creek running through the middle of it with benches to watch the Creek and the trout in it. I'm told you can get a license to catch one or two of the trout. The mall is in the heart of downtown Salt Lake with tall buildings, banks and the other spires of white-collar sacred places.

I am not a shopper, but I am fascinated by the concepts, marketing and design of first rate malls. If the same is true for you, be sure to get to City Creek.

Self defense is modern

I have written a great deal about self-defense being a modern idea. Here are some of the blogs where I have dealt with this subject: here here and here.

What I want to point out is that the recent Israeli air attack on Gaza was accepted in the United States by our weak president and by most of the pacifist EU as legitimate self defense after Israel had suffered from thousands of rockets aimed at its civilian population.

I have argued that the first role of Israel as a state is teaching the world the fundamentals of ethics. In this role it has to appropriately elevate the importance of self-defense as the first and core human right.

It seems that Israel is accomplishing this goal. More so since the damage it did by use of air power without ground forces helped the lesson sink in, worldwide.

Thank you Israel for helping the world take a major step in its moral understanding.  Far more important than Mozart and Bach in German culture that were obliterated by the moral values of the Third Reich.

For those of you who do not catch my reference: many people argued that the Germany that has raised moral status to such high levels as represented by Mozart and Bach could not have been expected to create the Holocaust. 

Good music has nothing to do with morals. The name Wagner should be sufficient to settle that issue.

Israel today, as it always has been, is the great moral teacher.

LDS making people better

I did see the musical The Book of Mormon and I have spent time in Salt Lake City.

The musical was upbeat, bouncy and filled with childish humor. Plenty of South Park scatological and 10-year-old language. One of the characters was Gen. Funk'in Buck Naked.

Salt Lake City is where one of my children's family live and thrive.

The musical is only interesting because a similar musical about Mohammed or the Koran would be banned on every college campus in America and made illegal in every city with a Democratic Party government.  The PC Left can only laugh at limited childish subjects and thinks the First Amendment is open to sandbox interpretation.

Salt Lake City on the other hand is fascinating because half the population are Mormons and I encounter them constantly in retail business and on the streets. I can say unequivocally that the people I meet from the LDS church are publicly nicer, gentler and more hospitable in every way than Americans I meet under any other circumstances.

Utah has a terribly low crime rate in the violence categories. It does have a higher than standard crime rate in the financial category.

The whole point is: the LDS church does a much better job of transforming and improving human beings that any socialist, communist or other ideological program to improve people. Go and look for yourself: Utah vs Cuba.

On top of that, the LDS church is very conservative and pro-business. I commend the LDS church to my readers if they want a mechanism to improve humans. 

(A statue of Commerce is on one peak of City Hall holding a shovel.)

Chick-fil-A

I recently went into a Chick-fil-A restaurant. I didn't have a chance to eat their but I did see how crowded the restaurant was and how 'standard American' the clientele was.

There are no Chick-fil-A restaurants in San Francisco. We are snobby elitists who don't want any poor people in our city and very few people from the middle-class.

What interested me were two elements that seems to indicate the reasons for this restaurant chains success.

One was the existence of three items on the menu that are in the appetizer 'to be shared category'. This is clearly a part of the social ethic of the Walmart society. Chick-fil-A is satisfing the needs of that community.

Second was the fact that when I went to actually eat on a Sunday, Chick-fil-A was closed for the sabbath.  Again this is consistent with the social ethic of the Walmart society.

In Israel most businesses are closed on the sabbath.  My friends always justify this in terms of a day of true rest that is good for the mind and a day to spend in the bosom of the family.

So Chick-fil-A supports conviviality and family. It should be no surprise that they are successful.

Only ‘American made’ store

It has been roughly 50 years since the United States began importing goods on a meaningful scale.

The earliest imports were the VW auto, Marimekko fabrics and Pier 1 assorted furnishing imports.  Today, virtually every physical product at retail is imported.

The extent of our importing is best measured by a store in upstate New York that only carries products entirely made in America meaning the US.  It obviously excludes Canada, Mexico and the rest of the Americas.

As the owner of the store points out:' there are no products in the store run by batteries or having a plug.'

That makes the store and interesting museum but a waste of time for Christmas shopping.

I am delighted. That means humans all over the planet are sharing their skills and talents with us. They are experiencing the culmination of commerce. Individuals and groups making the most effective use of their skills talents and knowledge and sharing them with everyone else by lowering costs and raising quality.

Of course there are those who don't understand this and think that foreign trade and commerce is somehow harmful to domestic production. It isn't. These people who don't understand reality should look first at unions and second at minimum wages. Those are what keep most of the unemployed unemployable.

Utah Natural History museum

I have visited many natural history museums around the world. I am generally not a fan. I go to new ones hoping that some section of it will be interesting.

The New York Natural History Museum enticed me because it showed that many animals evolved after humans reached their most recent evolutionary stage.

The most wonderful and successful natural history museum that I have seen is in Salt Lake City. The incredibly beautiful building and setting are merely the result of money.

It is the inside that is so stunning.

Here are some of the things that excite me and excite me about any learning experience.

The treatment of native peoples was dignified, respectful and accurate according to my daughter who is an expert. The exhibits were enticing and easy to understand. They always had a relationship to the present.

There was a great deal of authentic material such as dinosaur bones as opposed to copies and simulations.

There were many exhibitions with smells. I love that. It is a way that I learn. There were also live animals in microscopic environments such as a poisonous tarantula and a 600 million year old species of tiny sand dabs.  There were many do-it-yourself exhibitions for children.

There were many unexpected examples. A dozen species were compared on each DNA chain across a large wall, so all the differences were visible.

There was a meteorological exhibition that made it clear no global warming had occurred in Salt Lake City in a century. A tiny plaque indicated a slight trend toward global warming over one decade. The plaque was small and designed to be easily removed.

A favorite of everyone was a high wall with a dozen dinosaur heads... like the old men's private club with mounted animal heads.  Dinosaurs had wild structures on their heads.

Every single part of the museum was brilliantly thought out including the comparisons of human kinds' many ancestors and multiple theories of lineage.

The room where archaeological elements are sorted and prepared had a glass wall.

See it if you can.

Micro lending

I am faced with a never ending conversation promoting micro lending.

I have been listening to this conversation since the early 1980s.

I want to be on record as saying that it is bull shit.

I have looked at micro-lending programs in many parts of the Third World. I started looking long after I heard the idea promoted.

The idea always looked glamorous to people who don't understand business. It seems a simple way to solve Third World backwardness. It seems like something anyone can do.

Let us start with the fact that: I have never met, anyone, anywhere who had good business skills and could not raise money from their friends and family. Regardless of how little money their friends or family had.

Even in the most desperate circumstances, a person can raise money if he or she is trusted as a good business person. They can sell something of their own to raise money, they can do work for others to save money. It is simply a preposterous fallacy that people with business skill have trouble raising money.

On top of this fundamental preposterous notion, micro-lending systems inherently fail because when honestly examined their borrowers never repay the money. The borrowers simply borrow new money to repay old loans.

Everywhere that I have looked from Guatemala to India, the interest-rate has been high. We are talking 30 to 70% in real annual interest terms.

Put it all together and you have another Lefty fantasy that is generally harmful to the poor.

CO2, water and air

Just a strange thought on my part. Maybe evolution has a reverse element.

I bring this up because I was thinking about the vast proportion of living organisms that survive on CO2. CO2 is a infinitesimal portion of the atmosphere. It is four 100ths of 1% of the atmosphere. There is more than 1000 times as much oxygen as there is CO2.

So getting CO2 out of the atmosphere is significantly more difficult than getting oxygen which comprises nearly a quarter of the atmosphere.

Intermediate to land based and air based animals with their abundant supply of oxygen is the entire world of water creatures. Most of these creatures take in water to extract oxygen. They are extracting the oxygen from the tiny concentration of air that is dissolved in water.

How is it that so much of the world’s life is extracting bubbles that are dissolved in the water?

Life from an infinitesimal source in the atmosphere and an additional large segment of life must extract that atmospheric component from air dissolved in water?

This is what leads me to wonder whether there is a reverse element in natural selection that goes from very hard to very easy.

If you have thought about this question, please feel free to explain it to me.

High income tax rates

Two first class economists have written a paper showing that economic theory can be used to justify high personal income tax rates. They settle on a number in the 70% marginal tax rate as reasonable.

Their main argument is premised on the social welfare function.

In taking my Masters degree examination at UC Berkeley (I failed twice, even though my essay showed far greater knowledge of economics than any of the boobs reading it) I used the social welfare function, with all the mathematical details, to argue that the postal service should be sold. The Berkeley extreme leftist students grading my paper didn’t like what I wrote. The US government didn't spin the postal service off until four years later. No connection that I know of to my twice written essay.

A social welfare function is nothing more than the sum total of all the individual utility functions in the society. An individual has declining utility for anything. The more the individual has the less he'll pay for more.  That applies to food, sex and dancing. Since the marginal utility of an additional anything is presumably declining it is easy to see how the social welfare function could be used to justify very high progressive income taxes.

I simply want my readers to know that there are arguments for high progressive taxes.

Since I consider the population of people who make a positive contribution to society by starting their own businesses and introducing significant innovations to be very small, I really don't care too much about taxation. As I have said in an earlier blog, just stay out of these peoples way and their drive for independence and creativity will be unleashed.

However, as with states in which it is obvious that these creative businesspeople are willing to move to more favorable commercial environments, it is reasonable to assume the same is true of nations. Individuals who are creative businesspeople, though a tiny number, may be influenced by the business climate and the opportunity in some other country to make a fortune.

We cannot know how true this is and therefore an argument of the form presented in this article has no testable validity.

Vanguard

A few weeks ago there was an article in my local paper about the end of Vanguard Foundation. A very extensive and common type of fraud put them out of business.

I am not surprised. I helped found Vanguard in the early 1970s. The founder was Joshua Mailman. Josh came to me and asked how he could create a nonprofit charitable giving organization for the other millionaire heirs like himself who wanted to use their money to benefit the world. He meant giving to liberal and politically correct causes.

When Vanguard was founded its initial grants went to Lefty documentary filmmaking.

My advice to Josh was pretty straightforward at the time, very much like the advice I gave to many people. They did not know what the first step was to creating an organization. What Josh needed to do was to get his closest friends who agreed with him together to discuss their common interests. When the discussion reached the point of harmony, it would be Josh's job to create the organization, get the non-profit exempt status letter and open the appropriate bank account.

Liberal organizations often fail because Lefties have a complete hole in their brain when it comes to numbers, accounting, personal responsibility and willingness to stand up to other people.  Those are characteristics that invite criminal fraud.

Vanguard lasted nearly 40 years. That is a very good run.

Meaning of Pro Commerce

I have never said what pro commerce is about. In the current milieu it is common to see people talk about capitalism and the market.

It is also common for people to think of capitalism and the marketplace as synonymous with my notion of pro commerce.

That is not the case.

My experience of commerce is significantly different than that of nearly everyone else at this time in history. I have worked with over 1,000 businesses in dozens of locations.

I have written a book called Commerce. The book explains what commerce is, based on my careful observations.

I cannot summarize it here but I can say that if you search for the places on the planet where commerce thrives you will find a number of characteristics that are common to those thriving commercial locations.

The first and most important is that commerce thrives in urban areas. Perfect examples are Singapore and Hong Kong. Islands of urban diversity. These locations drive commerce because they have a diversified population. Diversity is the very first element of a thriving commerce.

Urban areas throughout history have been the locations where commerce occurs. The reason is straightforward. The diverse viewpoints, skills and talents of people brought into one location are a microcosm of commerce on a larger scale.

Commerce is the exchange of goods and services because individuals can accumulate knowledge and skills that allow them to increase their individual production.  Increasing an individual’s output in turn allows the individual to trade for a greater variety of the products and services that he needs and wants. It is this ability of humans to accumulate knowledge and skill that is the fundamental reason for trade and commerce.

Diversity of people provides a wider range of accumulated knowledge and skills. Just simply recognizing that some ethnic groups are better at cooking, some at repairing cars, others at technological innovation, still others at agriculture and others at theatrical creations is the basis for global commerce.

Similarly individuals in diverse urban environments have a wide range of accumulated knowledge and skill.  Which is why an urban area where diverse people live and work is more productive of commerce than any of the homogeneous parts of the world.

In addition to diversity, commerce thrives only in societies that respect merit. Merit exists as opposed to family choice of other people to work with or tribal choice of other people to work with. Merit allows the individual who is most competent to do each job.

The third critical ingredient for commerce to thrive is openness. Openness is a category that includes the subcategory of honesty. Openness is what allows people to work together productively. Businesses are built on internal openness. The first great commercial society was Holland, the first open society. Denmark was second. 

Think about what it must be like to work with someone who is secretive or dishonest.

Such a situation cannot result in productivity.  

It may be possible for one company that is honest internally to work with another company that is honest internally when both entities treat each other as enemies. However the productive part of the process requires openness and honesty within the entity that is productive.  Openness in the society is even better for productivity. Consider the two societies that leaped into modernity: Japan and Israel... both open societies.

Now put together what I have talked about here: diversity, meritocracy and openness. None of those subjects are treated under the title of capitalism or the marketplace.

What I am talking about as pro commerce is quite removed from the traditional discussion about our current world. What I am talking about requires a different perspective and a different way of generating the forces that have created the modern world. My analysis is different. You can detect it from your regular reading of this blog.

Pain killers

Recent news reports indicate that a high proportion of drug problems and drug enforcement are now focused on painkillers.

I personally have tried many drugs. Those include the wide range of mood enhancers such as cocaine, uppers, sexual stimulants and drugs that stimulate physical sensations over mental images.  I have also tried a variety of psychedelics.

I have also been addicted to painkillers such as hydrocodone and oxycodone.

It was difficult to get off of these painkillers after I had had a two month long bout of pain and surgery.

What distresses me is that painkillers are precisely what they are called. Painkillers. They are very poor at enhancing mood.  They are primarily good at killing pain.

If a large part of our population is trying to kill their pain with pills, they have my sympathy not my belligerent antagonism.

How about you?

Should people who are trying to kill their pain with drugs really be forced to continue suffering?

Why are we trying to eliminate illegal painkillers?