Pro Commerce

Fear of Sex

Many of us joke that LBGT is really LBGTQRSTUV. In some ways it is not a joke.

I write this blog because I see that the level of sexual confusion in the society around me is at a very high level and many young people have a justifiable fear of sex. I have particular concern for my grandchildren.

Sex education focuses on teaching about sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy. Neither are about sex.

Sex, 99% of the time does not involve either. It is the 99% that is not taught which leaves many young people with fear or anxiety. Men are told in a variety of media that they must satisfy their sexual partner. Women are told in the same media that they can reach an orgasm with the proper stimulus.

Here are the facts:

We Americans live in a Puritan society that teaches, in our deepest mental regions, that 'other people experiencing sexual pleasure is a taboo subject.' Therefore open discussion of the details of sexual enjoyment is a widespread taboo subject.

The Puritan taboo is real. In a project at Stanford, there were three groups with pre and post survey interviews. In one group, sexually explicit films were shown and sexual discussion became open and enthusiastic in the follow-up interviews. In another, National Geographic films with no sex were shown. The viewers in this group showed a movement to anti-sexual attitudes in the post interviews because they knew that another group had seen sex films. The third group, off campus, only had the pre and post questioning. Their sexual attitudes were slightly more sex positive in the post interviews merely because of the survey questions.

Kinsey, who applied genuine data collection to the field of sex, found two things of great relevance. Men and women all fall on a spectrum of sexual desire from strong heterosexual desire on one end to strong homosexual desire on the other end. Without sexual taboos most people can move anywhere along the spectrum.

I know from experience in a non-Puritan society, such as Japan, ordinary women and men move comfortably back and forth on this spectrum. I've seen white collar office working men kiss and fondle other men while drunk on subways at night, often strangers. I've seen mature ordinary women doing the same, including sleeping comfortably with other women. I saw several men, who having lived a decade with a male lover, were told by their parents to get married to a woman. Thenceforth they had satisfying sex with their wives.

At the same time Kinsey also found that the intensity of sexual desire is a distribution curve with absolutely no sexual desire on one part of the curve to some men and women at extremes, nearly beyond imagination on the other end of the curve.

There are men who can get a dozen erections and orgasms a day. There are women who can do much more.

A close friend had one female sexual partner who had 20 orgasms in a row; when he stopped counting, she had one more. I've seen reliable films where a woman and her partner had even more orgasms in a row. I know of orgies in America where most men were exhausted after one or two orgasms and women were still sexually excited after many more and looking for a new partner.

The sexual landscape is made up of shifting sexual attractions and extremes of sexual behaviors. There are men and women who have orgasms with no outward expression and others who scream at the top of their lungs and still others who faint.

What are the sources of sexual stimulation? Again, the variation is extreme.

One woman was observed stimulated to orgasm by playing with the palm of her hand. In three other cases, using every form of stimulation known to man, including vibrators, no orgasm seemed possible.

Every part of the body can be a source of sexual stimulation as can every form of imagination.

Only experimentation can determine the extent of sexual satisfaction for any individual.

How Do You Know You're Not Paranoid?

This is a problem for many who see the world through data and original documents.

A great deal of the Lefty world around us is in a state of sheer paranoia. A giant paranoid bubble. How do we know where the paranoia ends?

The data-documents-people of the world are not paranoid about major issues. We know from much data there is no human caused climate Armageddon. There was no significant Russian role in the election of Trump in 2016. Little or no truth comes from the NYTimes, NPR or CNN. No action by the President justified a Democrat Congress inditing on impeachment. On and on and on.

So how do we know that face masks in a viral outbreak is not a scam, that the Holocaust was not real or exaggerated, that Arabs brought down the twin towers? Where does data driven research based on original documents end and paranoia begin?

I have faced four mass hysterias in my life that were paranoia driven. Vast child abduction was reported in the early 1980s, kindergärtners claimed satanic rituals in the late 1980s. Women had sexual abuse recollections in the 1990s and population growth Armageddon was universally feared from 1965 onward.

In each case I looked at data.

• For child abduction I looked at FBI statistics that never changed and had good reason to be accurate and stable over time.
• For satanic rituals I talked to lawyers and some accused in the cases. From the evidence the reports were physically impossible.
• For parental abuse recollections I talked to well established and honest psychiatrists I personally trusted, they rejected it. I also had one friend who had a real abuse history and her multiple forms of evidence were overwhelming and not dependent on her memory recollection.
• For the population explosion I constantly checked population data. One day I totaled the nations gaining population and a separate total for nations losing population and saw that the loser total was going down faster than the gaining total was going up.

From my own experience I found that reliable data is an antidote to paranoia, but the data must have multiple bases for reliability or purity. I also rely on independent minds outside the issue being examined. I rely on personal experience too. I had built and used economic computer models and knew that they were useless for prediction so I could never trust climate computer models with less reliable input data.

For ones that I have found are not paranoia, face mask protection, is real. I've lived in Japan where face masks are ubiquitous and winter colds are nominal. The Holocaust was real. It left many original documents available at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. Also the 5 century history of European wanton murder of Jews is recorded hundreds of times in independent original writings.

The word in twin towers, TWIN, is the strongest evidence of Arab culpability. The same action in two independent events had the same consequence.

We can expect many of the events around us to be hysteria and paranoia. The only way out is a careful hands-on examination of data and hands-on examination of original documents.

 

Redundancy

This blog is about the labor market which is different from what we imagine. Healthy economic growth is possible with fewer workers in the labor force.

My title comes from the English usage which I find in the Cambridge Dictionary.

“redundancy noun (Not employed) a situation in which someone loses their job because their employer does not need them: [The economic downturn has meant 10,000 redundancies in the Northeast.

She took voluntary redundancy].”

I am prompted to write this because the U.S. recently experienced a pandemic and during the recovery in the third quarter the GDP grew at the same rate it had a year earlier. An historically unique economic event. A year earlier the unemployment had been in the measured 3% range compared to the current 7% range.

Let me offer a brief aside. In 1963, an economic committee with Robert S. Gordon as chair was formed to establish a broad measure of unemployment. I was a graduate student of his and did some of the background research. “Unemployment” was and is defined as the answer to the question “Have you looked for work in the past 6 weeks?” The answer is subject to all the uncertainty of any survey research question.

My real theme in this blog is that our measure of employment-unemployment is really a line of productivity. At 15% unemployment we have most of the employed doing 97% of the productive output of our society. Many of the people working are working very hard in a complex diverse economy and additions to the work force are not necessary for productivity. 

In numbers, there are almost 150 million people who say they are workers and are recorded on payroll taxes. Of these 22 million are government employees. I don't know what percent of these are productive workers. Based on my knowledge of San Francisco government employment, it is less than half. Among the remaining roughly 130 million in the labor force, 115 are doing most of the productive work. 'Redundancy' is the right for the rest of the labor force.

What I surmise as a reality of the labor force is that when we strive for low unemployment numbers we are merely adding low productivity workers, marginal output, to the labor force. Aiming for low unemployment has a very marginal impact on total productive output. Some 'unemployment', economists recognize, are people changing jobs. Maybe 2%.

The Federal Reserve has two goals: reducing unemployment below 4% and reducing inflation below 2%. The low unemployment goal is not based on reality for the United States.

Using the English term for unemployment, 'redundant', would be accurate. A large part of our actual employment, is 'redundant'. We could get nearly the same GDP output with only 100 million of our 150 million workers on the job.

(Thanks to Clifford Brown for his comments on this blog.)

Democracy and Broadcast media

You can tell if a nation has real democracy: its a democracy if the broadcast media is divisive hostile to strong leaders.

We know how divisive the current broadcast media is in the U.S. and we know about 'Yellow journalism' a century ago, including the hatred of Corporations. Broadcast media has always been divisive in a democracy. Usually the divisiveness comes from the broadcast media supporting the underclass and the revolutionary elements. 

Two things to note. In strongly controlled and traditional societies, like the many communist nations, the Muslim societies, Thailand and Japan the media is not divisive. In a democracy the broadcast media supports the part of the society that foments rebellion. Where the hereditary elites are in control the media is restricted in favor of the status quo.

Very true in ultra-democratic Israel today, very divisive broadcast media. Always divisive in the history of the U.S.

• The broadsheet media fomented the American Revolution and
• the hatred of the first National Bank,
• Newspapers fomented the Civil War, (especially in the South)
• the American entry into the Spanish American War,
• WWI and WWII.
• TV created the 'failure' and resulting political defeat in Vietnam,
• the Black domestic uprisings since 1964 and
• the hatred of Hippies.

The fundamental journalist adage is 'If it bleeds it leads'. Mass media audiences are drawn to anger, malice, doom and bitterness.

I surmise this response comes from biology. Broadcasts of danger are nearly universal in the social animal kingdoms. Most animals have a sound to alert their own species to danger. That call-response mechanism is used by the broadcast media.