Pro Commerce

Old Man Observations

I turned 84 years old last week.  I love it. No one has expectations of me. Not even simple repairs or clean-ups.

The greatest thing has been my recent insights, the product of having lived a fully engaged and enjoyable life.   I get to read, meditate and think, all day every day.  What an incredible blessing!

Even the most horrible consequence of old age has its silver lining. I’ve had six close friends over the past fifty years. Wonderful close friends who are all dead now.  Their departure has provided one of my greatest insights.

We aren’t homo sapiens, we are homo slow-to-learn. Very slow. We are not as smart or wise as  many animals; not even close.

We demonstrably had the greatest invention possible, fire, for more than a million years and the hands to use it.  A million years and we were barely more than a crude tribal minor mammal for all but the last five thousand years and only a small number of us became sapiens for the past two millennia. A fraction of the time (½ of 1% of our history) we were upright mammals and we did nothing noteworthy.

Only three things changed all that for the tiny number of we homos who created the modern world and the small number of us that use the modern world.

One, is the ability to read/write which gives us the ability to share, store and accumulate knowledge.  It isn’t an exaggeration to say that it was ‘God’s chosen people’  who did this first in a functional way.

Two, was the ability and willingness to cooperate with other homos who are not in our tribe and especially people who seem different than us.  For that we owe gratitude to the fortuitous evolution of urban areas and commerce.

Three, was and is the willingness to make empirical observations, test those observations and consolidate them into a coherent cluster.  Only a tiny number of people can do this, even today.  The others rely on magic, theories and fantasy. 

Four, we are primates who are unable to learn after we reach adulthood (age 23).  A few of us, 1 out of 300, can learn in adulthood.  In some homo societies, others can learn from the infinitesimally small number of people that learn in adulthood. 

1.

It is accurate to think of humans as stupid louts with small brains and limited memory capacity.,

That only changes when we can readily access the knowledge of people around us.  And that only changes when we can access the accumulated knowledge of the people around us.  The word ‘accumulated’ is only meaningful with the advent of reading/writing and the associated skill to debate and study.  

This I learned from having a close circle of friends (now gone) to use as information sources.  The cluster of us was my functioning brain and functioning memory.

2.

We are tribal animals. The ability to have friends outside the tiny insignificant cluster of tribal members is necessary to learn a meaningful amount about the world around us.

For this we are fortunate to have evolved trading cities where diverse humans are able to congregate and share knowledge.  Bless commerce.

3.

Most humans have their minds and memories filled with stories, magic and theories of the world that are fantasy.  Only a few humans have a significant knowledge base that is empirical. Empirical means tested and verified by repeated testing in the world around us. The difference between engineering and theory.  The difference between Hamilton and Jefferson, between Descartes, Kant and Isaiah Berlin. 

4.

My only source for this is the ‘Hundredth Monkey’ stories about Imo, a macaque, on the Japanese island of Kojima.  Only the young macaques were able to learn new behaviors.

‘Thinking’ is not what most people refer to when they use the word. Thinking is not choosing the right clothes to wear today or the best place to put the new air fryer. Thinking is taking two conflicting ideas in your mind and synthesizing a novel concept that fuses both together.  For example, theory and religion are overlapping terms.  Recognizing that is ‘thinking.’

Three New Insights

Three New Insights from the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown.

1. Oil/gas basis for inflation.
2. Big business vs under 50 employees and productivity.
3. Accomplishments in the new digital world and digital communication.

1.

The president of the United States with one stroke of a pen, in the White House, caused a severe inflation for the entire planet that will last eight years or more. 

At the same time the act revealed that economic theory is stuck in the 19th Century.  The prime builder of commerce before the year 1850 was manual labor supplemented by animal power. That shaped economic theory. After 1830 coal and wood heated water to generate steam which added new power to the commercial world. By 1900 the addition of oil and gas added geometric levels of power to commerce.  In the 20th Century oil/gas became so important that it was the substrate of all commerce.  Economic theory never noticed.

By 1973 a Coalition of oil producing nations led to an oil embargo which in turn disrupted all forms of commerce. This connection was incorrectly understood by economic theorists.

2.

A mild virus caused a pandemic in 2020 that infected the world.  In the U.S. and other major commercial nations a large swath of retail business and services were closed for many months to a year.  The GDP of the U.S. continued to grow while businesses with 50 employees or less were disproportionately closed.

This shows that economies of scale are the major, primary and possibly the only real source of economic growth. 

3.

The same pandemic led many employees to carry on their work at a distance away from the administrative core of the business.

This shows the extremely well developed level of communication made possible by (a) the recent digital and communications revolutions and the (b) insignificance of physical interaction between employees of modern commerce.

In a place like San Francisco, at the upper end of digital productivity, nearly 70% of office space was and is unoccupied.  It turns out that face to face physical contact is not necessary for the conduct of most business.  The primary need for in-person contact is for promotion within the hierarchy of the administration, little else.

One is an astounding discovery about the centrality of American oil and gas to world commerce. Two are more astounding pieces of new understanding of commerce that was provided by a global pandemic.