Pro Commerce

Eureka! Two of Two

An expansion of my previous blog.

Humans are not much smarter than other animals.  Me included.  Even in several hundred millennia, we have only created the modern world in the last quarter of a millennium.  Humans must cooperate to create anything and must accumulate knowledge.  Many institutions keep that from happening.

The ‘we’ of this modern creation is primarily one nation.   One nation out of nearly 200 in the U.N.  Only 25 of those 200 nations can create a bicycle without importing parts of it. One nation has created 90% of the technology of the modern world.  Israel is the second creator and only recently and Japan is the third.

So how did this happen?  That has been my lifetime quest for an answer.

The cargo cult piece of the puzzle was recent.   Humans seem to want to imitate the abundance of modern commerce.  In the Polynesians and Melanesians which saw the incredible wealth of the Japanese and American militaries that were brought with planes and airdropped came incomparable abundance.   The natives tried to reproduce the airplanes, radios and everything they saw out of bamboo and jungle products, expecting the gods to be delivered to them in abundance again.

Most of the humans on the planet have tried to do what the Polynesians and Melanesians did; they copied the behavior they saw and in most cases they imported the components of the modern world that they wanted.  The Bedouin tribes in Abu Dhabi and Dubai had oil/gas to buy and import a simulacrum of the entire modern world made of steel and concrete instead of jungle materials.

Now, my other question has been ‘What made the modern world possible?’  More accurately, what kept other humans from creating the modern commerce that created the modern world?  The question really is what institutions kept cooperation from happening?

That is what is in my Eureka email.  First empirical knowledge has to be accumulated.  Otherwise each separate human is pretty useless. 

We Jews gave that to the world with writing, debate about the empirical world and multi-generational education.  

Second, cooperation with a very large group of diverse people was needed.  That was what modern commerce allows.  The employees of my morning coffee shop are from every nationality, every religion and every other human distinction.

How did we get modern commerce?  That is what I outlined in my blog.  The tribe had to be destroyed, the hereditary elite had to be destroyed and empiricism had to be elevated to its central role in human knowledge systems.

Eureka! One of Two

I have put the last two pieces together in the puzzle.  

The puzzle is how an animal as limited as humans can build such a beautiful and complex society as we have today. The two pieces I have just found are ‘cargo cult’ and ‘empiricism.’  Other parts of the puzzle I have found during my life and can be found in my eleven books and my blogs.

Let’s begin with the ‘cargo cult.’

I have been baffled by the existence of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. How can a Bedouin tribe build a modern functioning city?  The answer is a cargo cult with oil/gas, steel and concrete instead of bamboo.

‘Empiricism’ comes from Yoram Hazony, who figured out that what created the modern dichotomy between Jefferson and Hamilton was that the former was a platonist and the latter was an empiricist.  That is the missing piece in the evolution of the modern world.

The modern world was created by modern commerce,  I have spent my life trying to understand how this highly improbable system came about.  Now I know.

First came the Jews who focused an entire tribe on the idea of a unitary god.  That created a coherent group who had to debate and understand how the world around us could have been created by a single entity. The Jews mastered writing and debate which elevated empirical wisdom and recording of that wisdom along with education to create an historic chain of learning.  We Jews have been the social lubricant of empiricism throughout history.

Second came the European Catholic Church which slowly, over a millennium, enforced the idea and institution of a marriage that demanded the isolated and efficient nuclear family.  Tribes could not create the global world of colonialism.

Third came Columbus, Kepler and Galileo, who used empiricism to begin the discovery of the world around them.  Immediately following these great technologists was the Dutch Republic, the first home of Protestantism and modern global commerce. 

Fourth were the pioneers of the empirical world, mostly in England after the Dutch invaded it.  Newton, Adam Smith, Priestly and James Watt.

Fifth was the creation of the modern commercial national structure by Hamilton and Franklin.

Sixth were the Colonial world, the Masonic Order and the Great American West that allowed for the destruction of the hereditary elite and the freedom of the other siblings to emerge.

Seventh, the discovery of Bessemer steel and oil, the key physical ingredients of the modern world.

Eighth was World War II, which caused the collapse of the American hereditary elite in 1960 that in turn made the spread of the modern innovative corporation and meritocracy a global reality.

Now I have it.  That is the modern world.  Just add the cargo cult and we see how the world of modern commerce became established.  Totally fortuitous.

The world of Modern Commerce, the world that I discovered, has allowed countless individual small-minded humans to cooperate and share their small units of knowledge to create magnificent technology and complex institutions.

Let us hope, that my greatest fear, that the world of Plato, Descartes, Jefferson, Kant, Marx and the Wokies will not destroy what we have accidentally created.

Ridiculous, Absurd

What could be more absurd or ridiculous than to give advice on aging?

I have never paid attention to people giving advice on aging.  Why should you?

To get to 100 years old, your heart must beat 3 billion times.  That is a lot, more than any living human can understand or explain.  Thinking someone knows how to get to 3 billion heartbeats is absurd.

My advice is about making old age comfortable.  In my early thirties I learned how to practice zazen, which is sitting meditation with an empty mind.  I have continued to do this practice ever since, daily (weekdays) for a half an hour.  Now in my old age I can sit comfortably doing nothing for hours or days on end, comfortably.  

That is a very helpful practice when your energy is low and nearly all your close friends are dead.  I’m glad I can do it.  I have led a very energetic life; now is the time for serenity.

I am not advocating for any specific form of meditation nor for any of the ideas, like enlightenment, that presumably are attendant.  Most rewards for meditation, such as enlightenment, seem overrated.  But being serene in old age is a great payoff.

Proof About False Econ Theory on Inflation

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog saying that econ theory was wrong about money supply being the reason for our current inflation. The real cause is the dramatic increase in the price of oil/gas the foundation of our economy.  Just as was true in 1973.

I've thought about a proof of my position.  Japan in 1995 began a period of deflation that has continued until the present. Deflation.  During that entire time the Central Bank of Japan has been printing money. Japan for the entire time, 27 years, has had the highest debt to GDP ratio of any industrial nation.  Currently the dept is 200% of GDP.  That is proof.

 

The Medium is the Message

That is the title of the first chapter of a prominent book in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan.  The meaning, outside the book, has been widely discussed.  To me it means that the social uses and forms of communication of many media is different from anything in its content.  Light bulbs,  automobiles, TV, books, etc are the media and the message they convey has to do with their impact on the culture in which they are operated.  Usually promoting some elements that were already present.

I have two media to discuss.  One is the Internet, the other is blockchain.

The Internet is a global network of connected electronic nods that transmit sound, text and images in a nearly infinite array of forms. Presently the images are nearly all 2-dimensional. The material is nearly all stored for rapid recall.

The ‘message’ of the Internet is that society will use this medium to reflect its existing social fabric.  Five qualities of the social fabric are promoted by the Internet.

1. There is always a structure to grass roots communication such that some people whose opinions are representative of large groups, become visible as informal leaders. So we get Internet opinion leaders. More obvious and more common than outside the Internet.
2. Our society and many other societies have a large array of ‘factions’ (Madison’s word) which become more visible as they are able to organize with a good peer-to-peer communication system. The Internet is therefore fractious.
3. Many people behave badly when they are anonymous.  Which is true of criminals in general and is true for a larger part of society than just the criminal class. Lots of nastiness from anonymous people on the Internet,
4. Wire-limited communication misses the conviviality and gentleness of actual live person-to-person communication. The Internet provokes interpersonal hostility and fighting.
5. People with political opinions that favor top-down changes to society (the Left and some other religious people) are intolerant of differing opinions and try to enforce censorship on disagreement. 

Blockchain refers to one sub-Internet quality, a medium in itself;  the ability to send copies of digitized material to multiple geographic locations at one time and have the material available for referenced review quickly.

For simplification I picture this as a fax machine that sends copies to several locations where the faxes are time-stamped and numbered in order for easy retrieval. 

This medium is suited to all legal and bureaucratic functions. The ease of retrieval will allow much greater access to the realm of laws and regulations, possibly reducing the role of lawyers and encouraging paralegals.  It may also reduce the onerous nature of laws and bureaucratic regulation. A great new policy objective established by President Trump.  It could play a political commentator role like I.F. Stone played in the 1950s and 60s.  There could be many I.F. Stones of many persuasions.

I.F Stone was “a liberal, politically outspoken reporter from the American left wing, Stone often had to work in ideologically hostile environments (military, diplomatic, business) where information was controlled, making verifiability the essence of his journalism, corroborated by facts in the public domain, which the reader could verify. About his style of work as an investigative journalist, Stone said:

I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these [political] pressures.

“The journalistic professionalism and integrity of I. F. Stone derived from his intellectual willingness to scour and devour public documents, to bury himself in The Congressional Record, to study the transcripts of obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports. He prospected for news nuggets — published as boxed paragraphs in his weekly newsletter — such as contradictions in the line of official policy, examples of bureaucratic mendacity and political obscurantism. Stone especially sought evidence of the U.S. government's legalistic incursions against the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens.”  (Source en.wikipedia)

The earliest widespread use of blockchain has been for bitcoin, a currency.  Currency can be any medium that is popularly accepted (cowry shells and cigarettes.)  The widespread use of blockchain as a currency has occurred because conventional currency is controlled by governments and governments are not universally popular.  Bitcoin’s future use is dependent on its continued level of popularity.  Which in turn is dependent on the size and locale of its users.

Wokeism Escaped From Prison

The butt-showing male pants came out of prison, as did the angry-at-women-and-the-world, rap.  The same is true for wokeism. 

I personally have never been a prison inmate, I only spent a few hours in jail after a political demonstration and visited at a recidivist prison near Tokyo. I had many acquaintances in the Prisoners Union.

It is pretty clear that many popular values come out of the black experience in American prisons including wokeism.  

• Wokies believe in systemic racism. They only mean anti-black racism.  In a society where blacks are 12% of the population they are more than 50% of the male prison population.  Prisoners, just looking around their daily life come to the systemic racism conclusion.
• White supremacy has the same origins.  There are plenty of black prison guards but the system is usually run by whites. So is the judicial system.
• Wokies are angry at economic differences. Hatred of economic success, is bred in prison where communalism is the way of life.  In prison nearly everything from food, to clothing, to bedding to TV and showers are nearly all the same.  Every little difference is a source of friction. As the seminal work, Animal Farm, makes clear: “some are more equal than others.” Hatred of the rich is normal for prisoners and ex-prisoners.
• Wokies are hostile to merit.  In prison only power and gangs have meaning.  Merit is meaningless and irrelevant.
• Wokies are miserable people and deeply believe in the human-caused global warming eschatology.  Prison is an unhappy life for many people who are generally angry at the world that has incarcerated them. This attitude spills out of prison to wokies.
• Prison generates a strong belief that the police are openly hostile to blacks.

Wokeism has escaped from prison, brought to the world by the black male underclass via the modern Left.

The Long-Term Problem

Five of America’s long-term patterns have converged to do terminal damage.

First, America was founded by Puritans and their progeny have been a dominant force in shaping American values. They are strongest in the Northeast, home of the major colleges and media institutions.  The Puritan value system has many elements that include 

• hostility to the idea that someone else is having fun, 
• The idea that luxury is selfish and 
• that everyone must work and is willing to work.

Second, deeply held Marxist beliefs came to America with European immigrants, especially Ukrainian and Polish Jews. Beginning with the Wobblies, and later the Communists, they became a powerful political force in government that Sen. Joe McCarthy attempted to stop. McCarthy was destroyed for his efforts.  Marxism only went underground because of the aggressive militarism of the USSR. Marxism always dominated academia in the post-WWII era.  The American Left fell in love with Fidel Castro until he became anti-American.  It resurfaced vigorously after the fall of the USSR in 1991. (I am a Jew)

Third, the post-WWII era saw a rise of the meritocratic officer class into major industries and brought about the consequent 1960 decline of America’s hereditary elite that formerly controlled American industry.  The vacuum left by the fall of the hereditary elite, in every urban area and in government, was replaced by the second strongest remaining organized force: unions with their anti-meritocratic values.

Four, Africans from tribal cultures were brought to America as slaves and a large proportion of that population have remained as the bottom social class even after the end of slavery. All other immigrant populations rose in the social hierarchy with hard work, meritocracy and assimilation to surpass the African-American population, by-passing the bottom class.  Asian, Latino, Irish, Italian, and Indian populations successfully assimilated. The success of other ethnic groups made the failure of African-Americans even more conspicuous.

Fifth, the anti-establishment 1960 hippies became champions of defiance and openly enjoyed drugs and living on city streets. (I was a hippie leader.)

Consequence: beginning in 1975 a former hobo population, imitating the hippies, began living on urban streets and using drugs openly. The former hobo population, over the past 45 years, has grown to a visible size and is disproportionately African-American. The street population is still a fraction of one percent of American adults.

This visible street population has been seen in the traditions of American culture as ordinary people with mental health and drug problems who suffered inordinate hardship. This is a Puritan view that is simply false.  The street population in America and elsewhere are simply people who don’t want to work and don’t want to participate in conventional society.  I know this as a fact having created the first and only park for street people in 1978.  I knew many hundreds of people who used my park.

A high proportion of street people are black males. The Lefty mind has seen this population of blacks living and begging on the streets as the result of institutional racism and white supremacy.   In a society where meritocracy and American global dominance has created thousands of billionaires, the disparity is seen as a case of American inequity.

Put it all together and half of America now believes in the ‘wokie’ ideology of 

• Systemic American racism
• White supremacy
• Gross income inequity in American society
• The social harm of meritocracy in the absence of union values.

I see no remediation on the horizon. I see nothing to alleviate this strong convergence of forces that will destroy America.

Multi-human dynamics

I’m taking a crack at this subject.  No one, to my knowledge, has done a good job.  The subject matter has many names which is evidence that it isn’t understood.  Mass hysteria, Collective action, Mass psychology, Crowd psychology and many other terms.  The best summary, I’ve found, of descriptions and theories is here.

I have personally been in the Dan White riot, many sit-ins, the Diablo Canyon protest and half a dozen protest parades. The most impressive was a protest near the Concord Naval Base where about 40 people, in a crowd of hundreds, tore up 100 feet of railroad tracks, by hand, and piled the tracks and ties in neat stacks with no supervision or tools.

I have also been on the outside of several hysterias where vast numbers of people held contra-factual opinions: 1980’s child abduction view that hundreds of thousands of child abductions were underway, the satanic rituals carried out in nursery schools, the recovered memory hysteria of the early 1990s and the most recent pervasive, long lasting human caused global warming and apocalypse religious movement.

There must be some human form of interaction that relates to these phenomena that needs explanation. It may be one or many processes.

• The first observation in my experience is the 80% rule.  People can not live in an environment where 80% of their own views are inconsistent with the group they associate with.  A Democrat living in a Republican neighborhood will become a Democrat, over time, unless he surrounds himself with many friends who agree with him on most issues. Which confirms the model.

This is a description not an explanation.  The explanation is tribalism. Humans are tribal animals like other animals and need the tribe for survival. It may be a learned function or a genetic function. From observing animals, including domesticated animals that become feral I lean towards a genetic explanation

• From my social thought work I have found that all institutions are built on over-riding metaphors.  The most famous metaphor is that markets are guided by an ‘invisible hand.’ Thus when free markets are observed there is an automatic human assumption of an active principle at work.  Many institutional metaphors are based on ‘the family’ with a parent as the top leader and protector.

This again is a description not an explanation.  The explanation is that the human mind has many worldviews that are largely cultural and these worldviews have a hierarchy of sub-views.  When a group accepts the overarching worldview then the members subscribe to the inherent sub-structures.  Thus, the global warming religious worldview has sub-views that lead to recycling and bicycle riding as moral imperatives.

Social thought is a structure of our mind, part of the way we are trained to think.  Much as language has a part of our brain (Broca’s cluster) so the brain has similar parts that organize worldviews into structures with defined sub-structures.  Our culture provides these worldviews and structures.

• Our vocabulary has a structure as well.  George Lakoff explains this in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.  The word ‘over’ contains the concepts of ‘up,’ ‘across,’ ‘on top of’ and ‘finished.’  The word ‘above’ is a cone such that a satellite can be ‘above’ the Golden Gate Bridge as it moves through the cone at 200 miles in space.  

Thus our language gives us structures that we use in constructing our worldviews.  Words give us directions and metaphors including the words ‘seize,’ ‘burn,’’loot’ and ‘riot.’

• Our reptilian brain gives us directions in the simple form of ‘fight or flee.’ Which can combine in dangerous behavior in a crowd during a fire in an enclosed space. Fellow humans can be trampled.

The reptilian brain, the basal ganglia, is directly in control of bodily movements. 

The amygdala is another part of the brain that contributes directly to behavior, paranoid behavior according to Dr. Ronald K Siegel. Paranoia is often part of human collective behavior.  

All these parts of the brain, (basal ganglia and amygdala) seem to play a direct role in collective behavior and probably play a role in communicating with other people nearby.  As in a crowd.  The brain is shaped to a large degree by genes. There is also an overlay of restraint that comes from our culture.

When we look at a crowd we can see the people as individuals but the reality is that there is a collective culture in which these people are embedded. That culture provides hierarchical worldviews with associated metaphors, language with an implicit conceptual structure and biological imperatives that are built into our brains and genes.

Multi-human behaviors should not be surprising or hard to explain. We are very much alike and we have myriad conscious and unconscious ways of communicating with each other.

We don’t really know much about our unconscious forms of communicating that allow crowds to function collectively.  

The only confirmed form of unconscious communication that I know is eye-blinking.  Higher status people blink much less than lower status people.  Higher status people can see this but lower status people can’t. Higher status people can recognize each other as a consequence.

Horses, dogs and other domesticated animals can put humans in the role of their alpha leader. There are signals that make this possible, animals respond to these signals but we don’t know the signals.

There must be many similar human forms of interpersonal communication that make collective behavior function.  We don’t know much about them at present.

Summary: Unsurprisingly humans in a multi-human situation have a vast common identity to direct their behavior as evidenced by our knowledge of social thought and language. How that communication occurs remains unknown.  When it is known we shall find collective behavior to be readily understandable.

Never run out of jobs

There are many cultures that contribute to the growth and vitality of modern commerce (Israel and Japan are notable) but America is the elephant in the room. America has had two extraordinary efflorescences.  A baby boom after the Civil War and a larger one after WWII called the Hippy Revolution.

There will always be new work for humans so long as the American spirit survives. The hippies embodied much of the essence of America. They were dirty like Vikings (as opposed to Japanese), believed in  ‘tabla rasa’ inborn goodness of people.  They were optimistic but had a religion of Armageddon.  They wanted to make the world in their image and many of them were doers.

The hippies found that 20 people could live on the earnings of one person and they did. 19 got stoned, hung-out and wandered the world. They, like others, had no reason to work.  

Hippies started their own businesses to change the world and over time the few founders hired the rest as employees.  The hippies created much of the modern world from the organic food revolution to alternative fuels, to robust bicycles, to new fabrics, health, education, new music, pleasure drugs and even the personal computer. Much more of course.

The hippie efflorescence of core Americanism makes sure that a few people will always create new industries to employ many others.

Evil

The nature of evil has changed in the past several hundred years and I haven’t seen any acknowledgement of this change.

In the traditional tribal world that prevailed before modernity, 'evil' was all that counteracted the forces that held the tribe together.  Very often it was the antagonistic behavior of ‘other’ tribes.

You can come to the same conclusion by thinking about evil in the context of what is good for holding the tribe together and respecting the authority and hierarchy of the tribe.  ‘A good boy follows the rules’.  Outsiders behavior is invariably seen as part of evil behavior. ‘They eat dogs and burn widows’.

America, since its inception and modern commerce, have introduced a new model.  The issue now has become the survival and thriving of the individual and the nuclear family.  Individuals are the subject of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.  Not the tribal French:’liberty, equality, fraternity’.  Those are tribal values in a nationalistic setting.

Try to think of ‘evil’ behavior.  I think of mistreating animals, torturing other people especially children and women.  Think of innocent people convicted of a crime, an abusive parent giving debilitating drugs to a young child.  Killing a public figure, destroying a public work of art. A person of one religion killing or harming a person because they are of another religion. Maybe worst of all, law enforcement maliciously harming an innocent individual.

Evil now is any and all situations where a powerful person or group uses that power against a weaker person or persons.  That is because the individual has become the highest value unit in the American world.  And increasingly in the modern commercial world.  We hire people for their unique skills and talents, not their family connection or hereditary position.  We value the individual.

Evil has dramatically changed its focus over the past two centuries, largely due to the nature of America and individualism and the values of modern commerce.  Concern for the individual creates the moral structure of evil as opposed to concern for the tribe.

In line with this unique American meaning of evil, the Bill of rights, is really a force against evil in favor of protecting the individual.  That is particularly true of the right to self defense.

The Bill of Rights is uniquely American and the source and product of our conception of ‘evil’.  

The commerce contribution to Trump

I’ve been arguing for several months now that Trump’s popular uprising has been based solely on a broad public distaste for lies by Barack Obama and the Democrat Party.  In addition, there is the shameless dishonesty implicit in the last 30 years of PC, political correctness. ('People of color' is OK but 'colored people' is racist.)

I don’t want to interrupt your reading flow with a list of the horrific and unique lies of the past 7 years.  That abbreviated list is at the end of this blog.

I see the rise of the Trump movement, and that is what it is, as a growing public conflict between the values of commerce and the political world.

The political world is very ancient.  When an Arab tribal leader sits in his tent listening to petitioners asking for special favors and judgement in disputes he is using time honored politics.  He must weigh multiple forces acting upon him from within his tribe and outside the tribe.  He must then find an accommodation that will be the most stable outcome he can produce.

I was in active politics for many decades and I do appreciate the skill and talents that make a good politician.  There are a few good politicians. Very few.  Politics does require honesty within the closed circle of the participants and an honest broker is truly valuable.  But dealing with the public requires the skill to make a statement that doesn’t destabilize the political accommodation without outright dishonesty.  Obama was never a competent politician, much less a barely functional one.  He could never negotiate with the opposition; a core skill of a politician.

Most of the public doesn’t like compromise and accommodation.  Politics is not appreciated or valued.  Over time as the civic clubs (Lions, Rotary, Odd Fellows, Masons) have declined so has organizational experience with politics disappeared from American society.

At the same time, slowly, more Americans have become part of the commercial world.  The commercial world values honesty, openness and cooperation at the highest level of those values.  If you ask most Americans working in the commercial world they would be unable to verbalize this reality because the false overlying ideology is so strong.  But anyone who lies to fellow employees will be fired, any consultant supplier or adviser who lies will be terminated.  Everyone cooperates in the commercial environment.  Suppliers must be helpful and cooperative to maintain their relationships, so must managers with staff and departments with other departments.  Politics exists within businesses but it is secondary to openness, honesty and cooperation.  Imagine a business where coworkers, accountants, suppliers and outside consultants lied.  The business would fail quickly.  

It is my contention, that slowly over the past century, as more people live in the commercial world and absorb those values, they reject politics more and more.  They reject open dishonesty.

That is why a businessman, who is notorious for blatant candor, and is outsider to the political world is the head of an anti-politics uprising.  

Donald Trump is riding a slowly rising tide of Americans who spend their lives in the commercial world and have become intolerant of the political world and the blatant lies of Obama and the Democrats.

Here is my brief list of Obama’s worst lies:

• You won’t have to change your doctors under Obamacare.
• There is no political corruption in the IRS.
• The Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.
• The Fast and Furious campaign of guns to Mexican cartels was started in the Bush years. (No.)
• The murder of our Libyan Ambassador in Benghazi was caused by an Internet video.
• The Republicans in Congress are the reason my many budgets and policies have not been enacted. (Obama would never negotiate.)
• The Citizens United court case gives foreigners the power to significantly interfere in the American political process. (Completely untrue.)
• I have supported programs to increase oil and gas production in the U.S.
• The greatest global threat to the United States is man made global warming.
• Trayvon Martin could have been my son. (No. The Obama’s were always middleclass, educated and politically connected).

Those are all open and deliberate lies.  Americans strongly dislike that kind of deception.

 The Trump movement is the confluence of pro commerce and anti-politics.

Social sclerosis

This observation may exist somewhere else. I just haven’t seen it.

As societies get older they become sclerotic. By ‘older’ I mean nothing more than a rising median age. Japan has an aging population as does most of Europe and especially Eastern Europe. The country with the worst aging problem is Germany. Germany is putting a scorpion on its back by trying to lower its population age with Arab immigration. Japan gave up trying to fix the aging problem.

By ‘sclerotic’ I mean that bureaucracy intrudes on everyday life to the point of draining vitality.

The example from my 45 years of spending time in Japan is street life. As recently as 30 years ago I could buy beer and sake from vending machines on the street. Everywhere. Banned for no good reason.

A decade later smoking in coffee shops was put in air conditioned rooms and signs were put on the street saying ‘no smoking in this sidewalk area’. Again no good reason. The smoking research in Japan never showed any effect of ‘secondhand smoke’.

Prior to this, young people in bands and young dancers practiced in a main street on Sundays that runs through a large central Tokyo park. Tens of thousands of young people paraded in great clothes around the bands in one of the greatest street events in the world. Gone, when the city tried to move the event to the fancy Ginza district.

In San Francisco, my lifetime is the measure. The Golden Gate Bridge and the 8 mile Bay Bridge were finished in 1937 after 3 years of construction. An earthquake in 1989 destroyed part of the Bay Bridge. Requiring a new 4 mile section. That took 12 years to build thanks to myriad bureaucratic rules ranging from ‘worker safety’ regulations, to ‘no environmental impact on anything’ laws and buy American preferences and union shop rules.

That is what ‘sclerotic society’ means. The whole society gets older, less vital, more crotchety and dies a slow death while complaining about noisy kids and rambunctious young people.

(You can find data on national median age in wikipedia.)

Do businesses need to grow?

I saw an ad for some schmuck who teaches a class on business about ‘Why a business doesn't need to grow’. His reasons for teaching the class were to promote 'sustainable nonsense'. This is clearly not a person who has dealt with real business.

There are millions of small businesses in the world that don’t grow. Growth is not a necessary component of business except in the syphilitic heads of anti-commerce Lefties.

Even among publicly listed companies there is a high proportion that don’t grow. In general they get absorbed by other public companies or get taken private by investors. But they do not necessarily grow. Even for many decades.

From my vast experience, consulting with several thousand businesses, the market in which the business operates determines the nature and degree of growth. So does management.

My favorite example is the Body Shop in the San Francisco Bay area. It grew to three stores, one for each of the three principals. They were happy and didn’t need to grow.

Along came a Brit who saw the ideas in the shop as a global business. She made it global and after a few years, went back and paid the three original Body Shop women for their original ideas and graphics.

The idea that businesses must necessarily ‘grow or die’ comes from investors. It makes sense in terms of investments. Since growth it is not inherent in commerce, many businesses are forced to grow by buying other businesses. That should not be read as anything but investor interests.

There is nothing inherent in business that warrants growth, other than serving a growing market of satisfied customers. Even then, multiple businesses can suffice.

The photo is a 'climax forest' with plants of all sizes and steady death and birth of life.

Not imperialism 2

I leave it to historians to fill in the details of global trade expansion and ‘nation building’ in support of trade, based on yesterday’s blog.

The interesting thing to me has been the function of trade expansion in my lifetime. My homeland, the United States, was mostly empty (possibly due to epidemics) and tribal groups were not amenable to consolidation in most areas outside of New England. The tribes were generally defeated in warfare and consolidated in grim reservations.

As modern industrial commerce expanded, the existing nation states around the world, became the primary trading partners with each other. They had only a modest need for the tribal world in the trading milieu, except for some natural resources. They fought over these resources in two massive global wars.

The United States won WWII and under its military suzerainty, applied the American model of government to the defeated nations. Such a model was and is conducive to modern industrial trade. The rest of the world came under contention between the U.S. and Russia. Both did their best to create stable sympathetic nation states allied with their trading circle.

The United States was able, with its overwhelming physical dominance and the explosion of new technologies, airlines, telecom, pharmacology, electronics and transportation to impose its technical standards and language on the world.

That is where we stand today.

Not imperialism 1

I heard the term ‘imperialism’ applied to a period in Arabia after WWI. On brief reflection I realized that ‘imperialism’ is a hollow meaningless term, much like ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’, terms that come from the same Karl Marx and the failed Lefty ideology.

So what really happened in the world from 1500 to today? Hint: today we call it ‘nation building’.

Tribes have always been at war with their neighbors. Sometimes just to get new DNA in their blood lines and sometimes to expand their territory when their population grew.

What changed in 1500 was that the long historic patterns of trade, widely known from the Hanseatic ports and the Phoenicians, was expanded. Small successful tribal clusters that already called themselves ‘states’ saw the advantages of trade. The model used was to create unique trading ports as many trading nations observed in the North Sea and Baltic.

The first ‘state’ seeking trade on a large oceanic basis was Portugal. Portugal created fortified trading stations: West Africa (Goree in Senegal), India (Goa), China (Macau) and even on a Western Island of Japan (Dejima).

Trade was done to export goods and services from the home state in order to create local employment. The trading states would accept anything in trade that could be used in their home market.

In West Africa (in East Africa sales were to Arabs) the trade goods the Africans offered the Portuguese were other African slaves.

In order to find tribes to sell to and buy from, the early trading states came upon the idea of promoting religion (Roman Catholic) as the mechanism to unify tribes into larger units. The Spaniards and Portuguese used this approach in Central and South America, to modest success.

The Dutch used the old trading model in New Amsterdam and a dozen locations including Java.

The Brits pioneered a newer nation building model. With effective ground troops they conquered entire swaths of land and put the local tribes under the British mandate. India, Pakistan and most of tribal Arabia (after the fall of Turkey in WWI) came under their sway. In Australia the local tribes were weak and Britain took the whole continent. In New Zealand the local tribes, Maori, were strong and had to be accommodated. The Chinese were much too strong a cluster of tribes and yielded only Hong Kong to the Brits. Japan was never conquered nor was China.

This model of trade expansion, really many different models, has been going on for 6 centuries. It has been put under one ideological rubric, ‘imperialism’ which is a hollow meaningless term.

Poetry

I read a little poetry occasionally.   There are many poets I like ranging from Cavafy to my favorite Ted Hughes.

This blog is to complain about some recent efforts to revive the memory of disgraced Ezra Pound.  Pound was unquestionably a traitor who ranted on Italian radio during WWII about how evil America was and how it was run by the evil Jews.

It is also claimed that he was a poet.  I’ve read some of his Cantos, the Malatesta Cantos, which are not good English and certainly not good poetry.  They are confused, arcane and worst of all, in English, have no linguistic power.

I think my judgement may be shaped by the fact that I read all his political tracts about money in pamphlets I got at City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, back in 1962.  The pamphlets were the work of an absolute idiot who had no understanding of the world and was nothing but your garden variety Jew hater.  

Only such a person could use poetry to be mistaken for a competent adult.  His poetry was no more competent nor meaningful than his other understanding of the world.  A buffoon using literary cover to pass for a competent adult.

The arc of human development

‘The arc of life’ has been a Darwinian process.  

We use the term Darwinian process, for lack of a better term, to describe the constant-random-modifications of life that are always underway. This groundwork of modification becomes the basis for adaptation to new environments when the environment changes.  

The planet, its atmosphere, surface. temperature and nearly every detail of physics has had large magnitudes of change.  'The arc of life' has been the Darwinian adaptation mechanism for survival in these radical periods of change.  One consequence has been the extraordinary diversity of species, in the millions of species and extraordinary diversity of niches to accommodate to.

Commerce can justifiably be called a subset of the arc of life, it is ‘The arc of human development’.  It seems that many species trade goods and services voluntarily.  Primates groom each other.  So do elephants.  Humans voluntarily trade goods and services at orders of magnitude greater than any other species.  

I have observed that this is the human attribute that has allowed our species to live in nearly every niche on the planet and expand our population at significant rates.  This expansion was nominal for the past two thousand years as pestilence and starvation set a limit on human populations.

With the development of industrial commerce, 200 year ago, the human population has expanded at an even greater rate than before.  'The arc of human development' incorporated the unique attributes of commerce to our species: meritocracy, diversity, openness and preference for markets.  These in turn gave us engineering and medicine to reduce pestilence and starvation in the parts of the world where industrial commerce thrives.

Some parts of the four components of commerce are found in other species.  

* The alpha male battles of big horn sheep is a form of meritocracy.  

* The multiple specialized functions of ants and bees in their colonies parallel human diversity. And occurs in plants in leaves, flowers, stems and trunks.  

* Openness seems to be inherent in the communication within pods, packs and clusters of many species.  

There may be something comparable to markets in some non-human species, I don’t know of any.  

Commerce is a Darwinian process.  The market is perpetually presenting different and often novel products, services and organizational structures.  These are always subject to survival threats in different environments.  Expansion and extinction are always at play in open markets. The horse and its accoutrements were in vogue for transportation for several centuries. Replaced by several petroleum burning machines and their accoutrements.  

It is fair to call commerce, the source of our planetary survival now and in the future, ‘the arc of human development’.

Hundredth monkey

In hippie days, an acquaintance of mine, Lyall Watson, published a summary of a Japanese monkey study.  It immediately became fact among the hippies of the world.

When Lyall’s material was later discredited as research findings it remained among hippies and New Agers as a parable.  

Lyall’s version was that monkeys on a river near Kyoto were given dirty sweet potatoes and observed.  The potatoes were to attract the monkeys to the research station.  The researchers, after a few years, observed that more and more monkeys learned to wash the sweet potatoes before eating.  They observed that this phenomenon spread to other monkey troupes all over Japan including other islands.  Watson said that once the number of monkeys who washed sweet potatoes reached 100 it spread to the entire population promptly. That was his ‘hundredth monkey theory’.

This became a parable, that when enough people hold a new insight it spreads by mysterious waves to every other human.

Careful review of the data found a real truth that I hold dear.  

Only young monkeys learned to wash their sweet potatoes.  Old monkey never did.  Young monkeys taught other young monkeys in other parts of Japan.   It spread by direct contact and only slowly from young to young.

The truth I learned from this study is that only young animals are capable of learning new things.  At some point the brain becomes hard boiled and no new learning occurs.  

I have picked age 23 as the point when human beings become unable to learn anything new.  They get stuck in the world view, the values and often the lifestyles they acquired before age 23..

Maybe a few people out of a hundred can learn after age 23.  They are the anomalies that occur in all natural phenomenon.

This explains a great deal of human behavior that I observe.  Nearly everyone is stuck with the brain they had at age 23 with no capacity to learn thereafter.

Important key to understanding America

My son has come up with a brilliant analysis of contemporary America. I use his material at my peril; he does a much better job of explaining and using it.

America's colleges and Universities were founded to protect and maintain our domestic hereditary elite. The same was true of the media which was owned by the landed class for 150 years and promoted the interests of the hereditary elite for most of America's history.

The hereditary elite gave way to commercial meritocracy in the late 1950's due to the rise of meritocracy in the WWII military. We lost our hereditary elite and its extensive interconnected clubs and social registers.

The hereditary elite is gone but the structure remains.

That is why we still have 'legacy preferences' and tenure in academe and all the media, but one, are now owned by arcane corporate giants.

The Left has scrambled to take the place of the hereditary elite at the top of the academic and media pyramids. They have three elements in common with the old order.

• 1) The Left tolerates no dissent and no free thinkers.
• 2) They look backwards to the socialist European order.
• 3) They are fervent advocates of the status-quo-anti with their anti-commerce-Armageddon environmentalism.

It is these commonalities with the old hereditary elite that direct their energies to achieve success in academe and media. They are also losers because they choose the two worlds with no connection to the meritocracy of the work-a-day world of commerce and engineering.

This explanation does a lot to explain the persistence of a dead and malignant Leftist world view. A world view that was destroyed in the 20th Century with its many failures and disastrous outcomes.

Must we hurt happy people?

Some of my readers know that I live in one of the most hostile environments for poor people and minorities in America. San Francisco. It is also one of the most hostile places in America for people who are happy. The local Democrat-Union government puts a high priority in running people's lives. It is a nanny government with a Puritan malice that seeks out happy people and punishes them.

Do you think I'm kidding?

Just last week, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that virtually eliminates a new business called Airbnb. Airbnb is an Internet based house sharing operation.  Not only did the Sups tax it at 14% in order to support city pensions for a city that spends 40% of its budget on pensions for unionized city employees but has three times the number of employees of a larger neighboring city, San Jose.

The single provision that is most hostile to Airbnb is one that limits the total rental of a house or apartment to 90 days a year.

Where are the happy people that are being hurt?

It is the people I know who use Airbnb and are ecstatic about being able live in a comfortable home where they can cook, relax, invite friends and walk in the neighborhood. This is what visitors love; and this is what the city is taking away.

The city's next intrusion into the world of happiness is its goal to eliminate Uber and similar successful ridesharing businesses based on the Internet. Riding in an existing taxi has two problems.

• First the existing taxi services are unreliable; you only have to miss a few meetings or airplanes to never use it again.

• Second the existing taxis are pretty grotty. Getting into a San Francisco taxi is pretty much like having sex with a toothless street hooker over 50 years old. It's gross.

Uber and the other Internet rides are the opposite. They are sheer pleasure. Every time I have taken an Uber ride I  express my ecstasy to the drivers who reports 'comments of that sort all the time'.

The real shock for me, is that some of my friends who now depend on the revenue from Airbnb and will have to change their lives to accommodate the nanny government, will still be voting Democrat-Union the rest of their lives.

Punishment doesn't seem to affect the thinking of Democrat Lefties.

6th Street Park aka Wino Park

I built a park for street people in San Francisco in 1978.  The lot was on 6th Street and Minna Alley.  I bought it as an asset for Glide Memorial UM Church where I was business manager and treasurer.  

The park was of great historic importance.  It lasted 3 years and was much loved by the neighbors and the park habitues.  The park was intended to provide peace, safety and a convivial space for people who were normally living on the street. Nothing else like it had been done before or since to my knowledge.

These are some of the blogs I’ve written on it.  The park has shaped my thinking on many subjects from Puritanism to poverty.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2003/10/puritanism.html A description of 6th Street Park, built as a safe refuge for street people. Nearly all street people just want a peaceful life.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2006/09/homeless_stabil.html  A description of research on street people who always seem to remain steet people. Decade after decade. Also, street people got the missnomer ‘homeless’ after 1981 based on New Yorker's blind 'do-gooder' ignorance.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2007/01/6th_street.html   My comments on recent efforts of renovate 6th Street.  We can’t  fix a street where street people have lived a long time.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2007/03/surprised.html Street people remain street people regardless of Lefty municpal efforts and regardless of the amount of money spent on them.  Talk to them an understand why.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2006/03/poverty.html  A real understanding of poverty comes from working with and being involved in lives of the 6th Street Park people. 'Poverty' is a word without substance.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2006/03/poverty.html  Getting a better understanding of the lives of street people from 6th Street Park; particually people who are content being outcasts.

http://www.well.com/~mp/a25.html A complete summary of 6th Street Park, written two years after it closed.

(Photo includes some Park habitues and some staff.)

Cardiac cath labs

This blog has two main components. One deals with the extraordinary function of Cardiac Catheter Labs and the other deals with the problem of government run medicine.

(Data sources are here.)

A cardiac catheter lab is a room with a surgical table and all of the associated surgical equipment plus an imaging machine that allows continuous imaging of the patient. The images are transmitted along with other vital signs to a small control room. The Cath Lab is operated by 5 to 7 trained personnel including surgeons and technicians.  Most labs are installed in pairs so multiple emergency patients can be treated as the team moves from one lab to the next.

A standard fully equipped Cath Lab costs more than $1 million and most of them are installed in pairs at several $ million.  The prices are coming down as one would expect in a commercial society.  There are roughly 5,500 Cath Lab's in the United States and I don't know how many of those are pairs.

In these 5,500 Labs there are roughly 1,000,000 annual catheterizations in which the doctor enters the patient's artery via the arm or leg and operates on the moving heart. Roughly half of these, 0.5 million involved implanting a stent. A stent is used to keep an artery open after a clot has been removed.

Cath labs have been in use for more than a decade and are now fairly close to most people in the United States. The effectiveness of a catheter lab in avoiding a heart attack with permanent damage is based on getting the patient to the lab in less than an hour and preferably less than half an hour after onset of symptoms.

It is my opinion, that we will begin to see a significant and abrupt increase in the lifespan of American males as soon as reliable data is available. I would expect the addition of one to two years in male lifespan within the next five years. Males tend to have a higher death rate due to heart disease.

I am unable to get reliable data about the number of cath labs in other parts of the world. From what I can tell there are about 10 labs per million people in England, less than 10 per million in Canada and roughly 3 per million in Australia and New Zealand. In the United States there are more than 20 per million people.

This takes me to the second point which is that the English-speaking countries who have nationalized healthcare are finding it much more difficult to finance these multimillion dollar life-saving facilities. I assume that in the rest of the world, it is even more difficult to get these very expensive life-saving facilities. That is probably because national healthcare is ultra cautious and ultra-stingy. It is also harmful to the health of a population in a period of dynamic healthcare technological change.

Mr. Fixit is gone

When I was growing up there were travelling fix-it men who would go door to door and could repair nearly anything.  Many had training as tinkers so they could fix holes in pots and pans.  They always sharpened knives and scissors.

Until I was in my mid-adult years there were repair shops in cities with piles of electrical appliances in the window including vacuums, toasters, radios, TVs and sewing machines.

Where did this all go?

It disappeared for two reasons:

(1) Our whole world of commerce has become more of a hive.  Few people can do other peoples' work. Technical skills are deeply embedded in every process from an espresso machine to a TV control unit.  Virtually no one has the multiple technical skills to do many kinds of repairs.  Auto repair people are trained in new technology as regularly as doctors.

(2) The Costco phenomenon.  Costco exists because brand names have become so reliable, thanks to Japanese brands, that virtually nothing gets returned for poor quality.  Before the rise of Japanese brands new products had so many defects that department stores couldn’t handle the volume of returned merchandise so they carried only a few brands where the product had been opened and inspected before being sold.  

Costco’s and their imitators sell products in unopened boxes from shelves piled high. The quality is so high the boxes don't need to be opened.  A tiny percent is returned, usually for non-quality reasons.

In Japan from 1965 to 1990, entire new Cadillacs had to be taken apart and reassembled by the new car dealers to make sure they met the Japanese standards of no defects.

Goodbye Mr. Fixit.  We now buy new products for less than we used to pay for repairs.

Russell George fights evil

The story is simple. The evil is shocking.

About 15 years ago it was reported in the prominent scientific journals that the areas of the ocean that had the least flora and fauna were those that lacked out flowing rivers with particles of iron in the water. It turned out that the particles of iron flowing into the nearshore ocean was providing the plankton with the necessary iron to carry out photosynthesis. The plankton provided the food base for a higher chain of flora and fauna.

At the time, it was proposed that more extensive fisheries could be developed by dropping iron filings into the ocean in the desolate parts of the nearshore ocean.

Many scientists proposed such experiments. All were rejected by the narrow minded, environmentally-blind authorities who had anything to do with oceans.

One persevering scientist/entrepreneur, Russell George, carried on the fight for more than a decade. When he finally realized that the environmental lobby was totally hostile to any experiments that might benefits humans by engineering,  he changed his tactics.

George was smart enough to finally get a native tribe that wanted salmon in their fishing waters. The tribe agree to have him dump a boatload of fine iron filings in their waters in the North East Pacific.

What George had figured out was that the ideological environmentalists were incapable of resolving a conceptual conflict between their anti-human engineering stance and their pro-native peoples politics.

Here is the report on George’s experiment. Two years after he dumped his boat load of iron filings,  we have the extraordinary abundance of salmon that he predicted.

Russell George will always be treated as a criminal pariah because he crossed paths with one of the most evil groups in the world: modern environmentalists.

But now we know it is possible to feed the world with abundant sea resources if we stop listening to the voices of environmental quackos.

Russell George is one of the greatest heroes of the 21st Century.  There should be statues of him on every university campus on the planet. (Yes, I know there are many people who hate Russell George and consider him a con-man.)

Original idea: two moral systems

Throughout history there have been moral systems in place within every culture. While each of these culturally-based moral systems have had different elements, they have all been designed to support tribal structures. Tribal structures have, over time, coalesced into larger units that form modern nation-states. I call this tribally based moral system the traditional moral system. Ultimately this system is based on a zero sum world where the amount of food and land are limited. Anyone or any tribe gains anything only at the expense of others.

In the past two centuries a new moral system based on commerce has emerged.

For much of the commercial world these two moral systems operate in parallel. The commercial moral system values meritocracy above all values. Meritocracy requires tolerance among working and commercial people so that they can tolerate working with and selling to others who are radically different from when. (A Bahai Lebanese engineer has to work with a Persian Shia sales manager.) It additionally requires high levels of openness and honesty among people working together. And it requires an appreciation for technology and the subsequent commercial-technologically induced world of change. The world of moral commerce is new and different and is based on a positive sum world. Commerce has brought wealth and prosperity to everyone in its path.

The difference between these two systems is understood with the question: 'would you prefer to hire a friend or to make friends with the people you work with?'

Both the traditional moral world and the commercial moral world exist within traditional nation-state and commercial systems that are amoral. The traditional world has tribes and nations that fight with each other, cruelly. The commercial world has people and businesses who will buy from and sell to anyone regardless of who they are.

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to see 14 other original Michael Phillips ideas go here.

 

Original idea: origins of modernity

Sometimes history is easier to understand after the crucial interacting elements of the time have played out.

It is my opinion that looking back three centuries on the origins of modern industrial commerce, from my current perspective, with my experience consulting several thousand contemporary businesses, has given me insight.

I see the period before 1750 as 50,000 years that consisted of the classic Malthusian battle between increasing food output and increasing population. The British, by 1750, were influenced by the Enlightenment and Dutch attitudes toward science and worked aggressively to increase crop and animal food output.

Two things changed the course of history. The first was the Glorious Revolution, 1686, in which Holland successfully invaded England and created a modern financial infrastructure (a bond market and sound taxation systems) combined with a Protestant explosion of individualistic middle-class values.

The Dutch-British forces of the time had already created a global empire. The the people in that Empire… the outcasts, the innovators and the losers in that primogeniture family structures were shipped voluntarily to the outposts of the globe.

What we ended up with was a British-Dutch scattered society that continued to expand its agricultural output dramatically. These food producers were middle-class citizens scattered around the world trading with their home countries. The absence of hereditary control at the periphery of the Empire allowed these middle-class citizens to create extraordinary value added in agricultural output and most importantly these citizens on the periphery created global trade.  

Global trade among ordinary citizens thence created the modern industrial commercial world.

Summary: rising agricultural output combined with a scattering population of middle-class Protestants who settled nonhierarchical innovative societies, created global trade networks. The sources of prosperity out-ran the Malthusian cycle and became the positive sum modern commercial world.

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Footnote:

The Spanish and Portuguese empires did not generate modern commerce because they were Roman Catholic with strong hereditary hierarchies and were focused on extractive industries not trade.

 The other 13 Phillips original ideas are here.

Can the Left destroy modernity?

As I have given further thought to the sources of the modern commercial industrial revolution I have invariably asked myself the question whether the Left can destroy the modern commercial explosion.

We are now 200 years into commercial modernity. The obvious Lefty forces intending to destroy the modern world of commerce are evident in the successful destruction of Europe. Nothing productive has come out of Europe since the beginning of the 20th century. Europe is a case where the hereditary hierarchy runs autocratic governments that control and manipulate all members of the society with powerful trade unions, myriad government jobs and highly restricted social relationships.

In the United States under the Democrats and Obama we have had a vast expansion of government and its rampant regulations, tyrannical government employees who have become horrible parasites with high wages and higher pensions.  We have unions controlling much of the government for self-serving interests. On top of that we have the new and most horrific parasites of all time, the environmental mandarins.

Can this life choking ivy kill or stymie the American commercial  world?

The Lefty machine of destruction is horrible and frightening.  But I would argue that it cannot, at this stage in American development, destroy us.

I find two elements in America that are our driving commercial force. One is the extraordinary freedom that young people have to explore their dreams and do it without any suppression from the social hierarchy. That is why places like San Francisco, with minimal and ineffective government are the magnets for young creative entrepreneurs. I do not believe that this freedom of young people can be squashed. The idea of freedom is too powerful to be destroyed at this point.

I would also argue that suppression of commerce with financial disincentives which can occur in the (a) progressive income tax programs, in the (b) healthcare tax on young people, and the (c) excessive loan obligations on that same young population, are not totally successful. I think enough young intelligent and independent people are capable of eluding these horrible repressive tools.

I have no numeric data points. It would be my guess that 10 to 20,000 young people a year in America are able to survive outside the Lefty parasitic commerce hating environment.  That number is sufficient to drive the American commercial engine for the world.

I think that number includes a large enough group of young people who can survive well into the foreseeable future.

Forced to deal with political morals

In an earlier blog I made the point that people do not go into business for the purpose of dealing with politics and refining their political skills.

The Left has the preposterous notion that it is business that corrupts politics. The exact opposite is true. Politics has so much control over businesses that businesses have no alternative but to learn the ways of politicians.

I am beginning to think now about how very different the commercial moral system is from the political moral system.

This is my first rough sketch.

I know the values of commerce are: meritocracy, openness (which implicitly includes honesty),  love of the market place and a love of technology. Most importantly business, because of its meritocratic fundamental attribute, also respects diversity in every dimension including opinion, ethnicity and temperament. Commerce knows that it is a force for change and disruption in a society. For most of commerce, the industrial component, the main goal is to reduce costs and attract customers. Life is a grandiose opportunity.

I struggle to make a comparable paragraph about the values of the political moral system. I will try.

Political moral values in somewhat the same order of the commercial values in the paragraph above: Loyalty to family members. Giving a priority to finding compromise for conflicting power sources. Honesty among peers is important but not for politicians in dealing with the public. Hyperbole is accepted. Secrecy is necessary for most political negotiation. Maintaining the status quo is paramount. Today's friends can be tomorrow's enemies and vice versa. The world is about manipulation of everyone and everything. Everyone owns a part of you (blackmail) and you must own part of everyone else of interest to your future. Life is a game of calculation and cunning.

I have only begun this project and welcome everyone's contributions to explore the differences between commercial morals and political morals.

Two distinct moral systems

For most of human history starvation and early death were the norm and only a tiny fraction of the population lived outside the realm of hunger, pain and fear.

That began to change in Holland in the 1600's and England in the early 1800's. Today we are more different from our ancestors before 1800 than ever imaginable.  And we live radically different lives than those outside the industrial commercial world.  The reason is that a new moral system came into being with the development and expansion of industrial commerce.

The previous universal operating moral system for millennia was a political-moral system.

We now operate in both an industrial-commercial and a political-moral system.

The political-moral system is a zero sum approach based on balancing power and maintaining the status quo.

The industrial-commercial moral system is a positive sum approach to human problems based on reducing all costs and using innovation.

The moral system that goes with each of these systems in their purest form is straightforward. Machiavelli in the Prince and James Madison in Federalist 10 explain that the goal of the political-moral system is to balance competing power groups in order to maintain the status quo of the society.

In the political-moral system everything that supports the status quo is desirable. It is desirable even if it requires aggressive action such as destroying neighbors or enemies. In itself it is not static but it's goal is to retain the status quo. Unions are the epitome of a political-moral value system. Unions maintain that every person must be equally productive or nonproductive, seniority is the only reward. No rewards should be used to change incentives or increase differences in production. In fact, rules should never be changed. Mediation should always be the norm.

The political-moral system favors packages of laws, like the Ten Commandment's. The father tells the child everything that he cannot do. Secrecy is viewed as necessary. Cunning is a recognized positive attribute.  All changes due to technology or innovation are suspect and invite suppression. Ideas that change, new values that appear are political-moral negatives. Europe under the popes from 400 to 1500 was the ideal world.

The industrial-commercial moral system favors managerial values. It believes in rewards for good behavior and education to remedy bad behavior. It strongly rewards differential production and output and skill. It is always encouraging growth, diversity, openness, honesty, technology and is welcoming to change.

We are living in an era where both moral systems are operating and are in constant conflict.

Each of us has a mixture of these moral system.

In time, we will come to see these moral systems as separate. We will understand the need to keep them separate. Political people will be allowed to operate within their values in their government institutions but they will be restricted and limited because they have no relevance in the moral world of industrial commerce.

When we complain that chain businesses put small local stores out of business and create zoning laws to protect the locals we are using a political-moral system. When we consider a highly paid city union bureacrat unfair to charge an eldery pernsioner a high penalty for a trivial mistake we are using industrial-commercial morals.

I have not named these two moral systems. That will come later.

Mental illness solution

There is much discussion in the United States about gun control.

The Left is fanatic about the need to control guns as a way to keep criminals and dangerous lunatics from killing everybody.

The Right points out that the problem is that laws don’t affect criminals and that mental illness is usually the cause of mass killings not guns.

The problem with government control of the mental illness problem is that we can neither trust the government to make such judgments nor can we trust the term ‘mental illness’ to be a reliable term.

An experiment at Stanford got 19 psychology students committed to mental institutions after they studied a variety of mental illnesses that they simulated. They were unable to get themselves out of the mental illness institutions. Even the faculty and the Dean of Stanford had trouble getting them out because there is no definition of ‘not mentally ill’.

I have also pointed out in earlier blogs that dangerous people are easily identified at the kindergarten and first grade stage but we would never want somebody labeled all their life based on observations at that age.

I have a solution.

At this point we have drugs that can control some of the worst forms of mental illness. In a few instances, where I have personally observed it, these drugs are terribly effective. The person is stable and reliable on the drugs and crazed when off the drug.

My solution is to create a special court that has the power to supervise people on mental illness controlling drugs who are potentially dangerous when they are off the drugs. People will be able to appeal to this court to get off the drugs when they can demonstrate stability and lack of danger. But the court will have the power to enforce the continued use of the drug when the drug use shows clear ability to restrain dangerous behavior.

The court is not a psychologist. The court looks only at behavioral evidence. The court does not prescribe mental illness drugs nor apply them in the first case. It only deals with people who are on drugs and stable while on the drugs.

What is your response to this idea?

Born equal: democracy and genetics

I recently made an observation that I wish to present to my beloved blog readers. This may be an original idea.

Democracy may be a biologically advantageous political system. When I'm referring to democracy I am referring specifically to the American model which is a limited government, multistate, Republic.

The biological fact of human beings, Homo sapiens, is that we are like apples.  Every child born is a reversion to the standard human being.  Plant a fancy Fuji apple seed and you get the standard crab apple. We constantly return to the norm of the population. With excessive inbreeding, our lineage dies.

If that is the biological fact, then any idea of a biologically bred upper-class, or lower-class, is bound to fail because there is no biological way to maintain the inbreeding superiority or inferiority in humans. Certainly, in the past, such inherited class categories have been created by culture. When families tried to inbreed they died out.

In the most extreme cultural case, Japan, the hierarchical social structure is maintained by selection of outstanding genetic individuals and marrying them higher in the hierarchy for their talent. This is still a cultural mechanism since the genetic material (their children) always revert to the population norm.

Over long periods of time, the question becomes what political system is most capable of accommodating a society that always reverts to the genetic norm?

I would suggest that American-style democracy creates the most favorable environment for the favorable-sporadic-random gene to become highly productive for the society. That productivity may be in any domain: culture, science, politics or most importantly commerce.  Such wonderful outliers have the greatest chance of making a social contribution in an American world.

Doesn't this strike you as an interesting thesis? That American-style democracy has a biologically favorable role.

A friend commented that American style uses a high level of chaos to produce innovation.  Yes, and that is also how biology works in the genetic world. Random variation with selection for favorable attributes.