Pro Commerce

Two Women

I can identify two women I met who had a big impact on me.

Both were strangers.  The first was in the early 1960s when I was starting a new marketing research department (with Joe Bowler) at the Bank of America.  She asked me to comment on a research project she was leading at the University of California Medical School on why some aspirin was more fast acting and less irritating to the stomach.

I pointed out that I seldom saw good research in medicine and as an example, I doubted that her team ground-up all the test samples before using them.  She said ‘no’ but she would do so immediately.  It turns out that how tightly packed the commercial pills were compressed was what determined the speed of getting into the bloodstream and the source of stomach irritation.  I quickly got a widespread reputation in the Bay Area as an important designer of research methods. That reputation lasted for several decades. I was consulted often on research design.

The second woman I was flirting with at a party in the early 1970s,  was a marine biologist from Harvard.  I told her I had made a grant to an anti-whaling leader and I wondered if the anti-whaling movement had its science right.  She arrogantly told me how, she above all, knew how bad the situation was for whales.  

Her arrogant certainty led me to do my own research. I found that a few whale species were seriously endangered by whale hunting but the most widely hunted species had large populations of reproductive females with nothing near dangerously low numbers.

That led me to start an anti-anti-whaling movement.  I published an article in the CoEvolution Quarterly that pointed out the facts and suggested that the anti-whaling movement was basically racist anti-Japanese.  The USSR, our cold war enemy, was also a whaling nation but there were no boycotts of the Bolshoi Ballet.

The article was read by my friend, then governor of California, Jerry Brown, who called a meeting of leading anti-whaling organizers and demanded they set the facts straight or stop their campaigns.  They stopped and the U.S. movement came to a halt.

By the late 1990s this history was well known in Japan and several documentary movies were made about me and my role.  

This is a belated thank you to those women.

Jews Who Read Hebrew

This truism is so veritable it could almost be elevated to a Rule: Jews Who Read Hebrew Support Trump.

My guess is that this truism is nearly 95% accurate. As I tell anyone who will listen, anything in the human domain or found in nature that is 95%, or 1.96 standard deviations above the mean, should always be treated as 100%.  I’ve spent my adult life doing survey research and when I see a 95% result, I know that is as close to 100% as a human measurement can get.

So how does it apply to Jews?

To start with, nearly all American Orthodox Jews can read and write Hebrew. They nearly all supported Trump and still do.  Nearly all Jewish Israelis support Trump, and they can read and speak Hebrew. That leaves a few American Conservative Jews and even fewer American Reform Jews who can read Hebrew. My guess is that these few are Trump supporters.  

The issue arises because the VA primary physician I have used for two decades asked me if I was happy with the election of Biden, as he is.  My answer was “absolutely no.”  I explained that I support Trump, even more so because it is a major issue for me as a Jew.  Trump was the greatest friend of Jews since Cyrus the Great.  Obama hates Jews and Biden is clearly an Obamian who seems content to follow the Jew hating State Department anti-Israel anti-Jew position.  My physician’s response was “Aren’t most American Jews Democrats?” About 60% of American  pseudo-Jewish voters are Democrats.  (However I must acknowledge that according to a recent Pew survey, many of these Democrats claim to care about the well-being of other Jews. Their voting just doesn’t reflect it.)

That discussion with my doctor led me to the truism of this blog.

When the gene is finally found for reading, Jews will have the gene expressed by nearly 100%. Because Jews, for nearly 3000 years, that is 90 generations, enough for behavior to be infused in the DNA, have been readers.  For 90 generations Jews have been reading Hebrew.  Only recently, for about 3 generations has the reading gene not included Hebrew.  Nearly all Jews have libraries and read constantly.  

No other population on the planet have been readers for more than a few generations. Readers of any language.  A good future survey that purports to measure the behavior of people who claim to be Jews should qualify the Jewish definition by asking ‘How many books do you own?’ ‘How many books have you read in the past month?’  Calling oneself a Jew is not a sufficient definition.  Being a reader is a good qualifying measure.  Reading Hebrew is even better.

Am I exaggerating?  Probably, but not by much.

Identity

I have on occasion been asked to help people find their identity. It is assumed that I know what identity is because I consult with business people. I have written about right livelihood which presupposes identity.  Right livelihood is the productive action that follows from understanding one’s identity and talents.

When we are with friends we generally know who the friends are as people. We know their identity. In many cases we may not be willing to say what we know out loud; as is the case for a friend of mine who is weak, indecisive, lost and sucks the energy of other people.  That is actually identity. This friend is also generous, kind and loyal; a subset of identity. But this person means occupation and social status when they use the word identity. Both are flimsy alternatives to their real identity.

Many people associate identity with personal goals, drives, passions and lifestyle.   Which anyone may or may not have, regardless of identity.   Loving animals and caring about them is not identity.

I’ve never been able to help other people find, describe or recognize their identity.  Maybe I’m too polite.  Without a self-understood identity, most people can be perfectly functional, and most people are.  

This is an era where a vast swath of people don’t know their identity and they choose to use race, gender, ethnicity or politics as their identity. That is usually a source of unhappiness. We are certainly in an unhappy era with the woke population.

Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton don't know their identity but Elon Musk and Donald Trump do.

Knowing one’s identity helps one move through the world, comfortably.

One of the most visible outward signs of the national loss of identity are the Industry codes and the occupation codes published by the U.S. government.  Today’s list of industry codes numbers four digits, up to 10,000 industries. The occupation codes are six digits, up to 1,000,000.  Which really means there are few if any meaningful occupational categories.

When these codes were first developed in the 1930s, there were only one thousand industries and ten thousand occupations.  

Before that most occupations were known to ordinary people. Farmer, minister, mechanic, laborer, manager, dentist, et cetera. When I was in the Army in 1960 I could find my occupational code. By 1970 there was no such code for me.

In this way, modern commerce has created a very fluid world of work and simultaneously created a wasteland of identities.

Identity, real identity is now more important for a stable, comfortable person and much harder than ever to determine.  

While I don’t consider my advice very helpful, start by asking a close friend to give you some useful descriptors of the kind I used above.  Use character attributes, not personality qualities. Use strong-weak, confident-lost, curious-incurious, determined-lazy and similar attributes.  Knowing one’s identity makes life more comfortable.

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My son read this blog and said I needed to write more.

Identity is expressed by posture and life choices.  Humans can read posture, but can seldom describe how to interpret it.  Horses, dogs and many other animals can read posture, too.   They always know an alpha male. Humans can too but we can seldom verbalize our observations.

Life choices also define identity.  My son mentioned a work of fiction that looked at alternative lives that a person might have lived had important choices been different. It was fiction.  Life choices we make are integral to our identity.  I know a young girl who became a vegetarian at age five.  It is increasingly obvious, as she is now a teenager, that that was an important part of her identity. For myself, I can see that my identity was reified throughout my life as I made major decision after decision.  By my mid 20s, my identity was well established both for me to recognize and for those around me to observe.

Speaking two languages

I joined a partnership in Tokyo that is described in an earlier blog post. It was the world’s first social think tank.  We solved business problems involving social structural matters.

What reminded me of this is a first rate book on language that I am reading. I learned there are many language communities, around the globe, where the inhabitants communicate in two languages.

That is how my partner and I communicated in our social think tank.  Takekawa san spoke modest English and I speak modest Japanese.  We were discussing very important business issues as we created new types of social research technologies. We had to be sure we understood each other correctly.  Our business success depended on it.

I spoke to Takekawa in my poor Japanese and he told me what he thought I said back to me in his poor English.  Since we were hearing the ideas in our native language we knew whether we were correctly understanding our partner.  I thought our language relationship was unique over the 15 years we used it.

It wasn’t.  We had started out many times using a translator but found using two languages we could understand each other better and more accurately.

In the earlier blog reference I mentioned several projects we worked on, but I forgot an important one. Our client was a recent Shinto-like new religion that was growing fast.  Japan has many of these. They needed a funeral ceremony and an in-home altar.  We used focus groups with their older members and surveys of the field and provided them with both the ceremony and the new altar.

Yes, Japanese people as a group have a higher IQ than most other cultures and they are social innovators. That is why they were the first to have a social think tank.

Let’s Have Kids

Historically, humans have had children because children were productive assets.  While children were a cost burden until age 9 in most traditional societies and their survival to age 21 was very low, the family produced many children to offset losses and the early cost.  By their teens, the cost of the children was usually paid-off. From that point on the family benefited financially from having many children.

This reality prevailed until the beginning of the 20th Century when child mortality dropped rapidly and the costs of raising children extended until their late teens. Where this happened we see a rapid decline in the number of children per family.

I have observed that today and for the past half- century the willingness of married adults to have children and the number of offspring is related to a single issue in developed commercial societies: is the population optimistic about the future?  If the answer is positive then the population is growing, and if the answer is negative the population is declining.

Most of the population of the world is still under-developed in terms of modern commerce. Most of Africa, China, Southeast Asia and much of Latin America is rural and has not entered the modern commercial era.  The population is still growing with outmoded anticipation of high mortality and early age productivity. Most of the rest of the world is facing declining population.

The U.S. saw a massive baby boom after WWII associated with victory and widespread optimism. Their offspring, the hippies, were generally optimist about their personal lives (but not their Armageddon worldviews).  Europe after the war was the first region to experience a decline in population, which became more rapid as the grim reality of living in a cradle to grave socialist society became more entrenched. Japan experienced the same population decline as the Japanese realized their much loved traditional society was gone, never to return. The USSR and Russia experienced the most dramatic population decline as the society realized that a post- communist society was not really post- communist and had no future at all.

On the whole planet only one society that is a modern commercial society has a growing population, only one, and that is Israel.  Israel is the great new prosperous state that is a miracle for the Jews who were in exile for two millennia. The Jews, who have close and extensive friendship networks from being in the army together, are strongly optimistic about their country and their individual lives.

America, which was always an optimistic country because of its singular constitution and its special vision of hope for the world, has lost that positive vision. It is mired in the grim world of hate and ethnic division that goes by the name of ‘wokiness.’ The newborns every year, which I formerly could count on being 4 million boys and girls, is now down to 3.6 million and has been declining for decades.  Americans no longer see a hopeful future, especially the urban woke.  This is what we learned in the recent Covid cataclysm:

• “The percentage of births to New York City residents that occurred outside of the city increased for all months from March through November, the report found. Non-Hispanic White residents were 2.5 times more likely to give birth outside of the city in April and May 2020 than in the same period a year earlier.”

That says it all.  The wokies have brought us despair.  The rest of Americans are more upbeat.

I see in my grandchildren, as they graduate from college, no vision for the future, no hope and a future life without meaning. For them, America is lost.

Ron Boise Kama Sutra

As usual I found material online that is far from complete and I need to add my own experience to the collection. The material I found on Ron Boise the sculptor was here and here.

In late 1963 I bought five sculptures I saw in a North Beach gallery. The Vorpal Gallery (from “the Vorpal Blade went snicker snack” Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky) was owned by Muldoon Elder.  We became close friends and remained so for many decades.  

The five sculptures were one foot high on a wooden base. They were on my mantle at three different homes.  My children grew up with them.  I finally sold them back to Muldoon in the late 1980s for a little more than I paid for them.   Interestingly, at the many parties I had at my homes, the women visitors liked the sculptures and a few men were offended.

In early 1964 the San Francisco police raided Muldoon’s gallery and seized much of the Ron Boise sculpture as obscene. The trial was a few months later. 

My first function was to talk Muldoon out of hiring the lawyer he asked to represent him, Fay Stender, a political radical who would have generated opposition just for her role in the case.  I got him to use Marshall Kause at the ACLU who brought in the trial lawyer who won the case, Ephraim Margolin.  Ephraim became a lifelong friend of mine.

For three months I ran a campaign of coffee clutches and neighborhood talks among San Francisco wealthy art patrons, because I believed, at the time, that public sentiment would influence the jury outcome.

The trial had several significant features: 

• The judge allowed Ephraim to bring in Boise‘s larger sculptures and place them around the room. One was of Harry Truman whose arm and hand pointed at the jury. 
• Another was to bring me in, as a Republican banker in a three-piece suit to testify that I bought the Boise sculpture as fine art for my home. 
• The last was my suggestion to have the director of the Legion of Art museum testify, then demand he explain the ten-foot high bodily entwined sculpture by Rodin in front of the museum that was clearly sexual.  A year after the trial he removed the heavy marble Rodin, never to be seen again.

While the jury came back with a unanimous verdict in Ron’s favor, our own poll of the jurors revealed that one woman, from a small town in Texas, was the sole hold out for six hours.

Muldoon is known widely as the gallery owner who was the main seller of M.C. Escher prints in the U.S.  His business grew rapidly with a gallery in New York and Southern California. Escher, who lived in Holland was very restrictive in his sale of prints.  Muldoon solved that problem by enlisting every good-looking woman he could entice to fly to Holland to buy as many prints as Escher would sell.  Muldoon sent a long string of women to Holland to build a very large collection for retail sale.