Pro Commerce

Global News Reading Failure

I have a wide circle of friends in Japan and I read several English language Japanese newspapers.  I also have friends in many other countries and follow the press in four of them..

Each country has its own political spectrum.  The American spectrum is from Hate Trump to Love Trump.  Almost everyone in the world thinks America is predominantly on the Hate Trump side of the spectrum, if they have any opinion about American politics.  Russian and Chinese citizens do not hold this view.

Of course, in reality, American politics is divided four ways.  Half of adult citizens don’t vote. Among the remaining half the percentage is 25% love Trump 10% are in the middle and 15% hate Trump.

Why does the world have such an incorrect Hate Trump view of American politics?

Because the American newspaper that shapes global opinion is the New York Times.  Most of the world has no idea, and I can say this for certainty about Japan, that the New York Times is 100% in the Hate Trump column and has been for a decade. The New York Times also hates Israel and has for 45 years. It has hated Jews for 80 years. 

 The New York Times is the spokes medium for the ‘Woke’ world.  Most of the world doesn’t take the Times seriously for two of its three main Woke theses.  The readers of the world do not think there are more than two genders and they doubt that America has a systemic hostility based on race.  From reading the Times articles about the multiple black elected officials the readers would guess that blacks hold more elective offices in America than are found on the entire continent of Africa.  A quick search of Google would confirm that view.  

The NYTimes view that has global concurrence is the human caused global climate Armageddon.  This is not held by Chinese, Russian, Indian or African populations.

Is this NYTimes global opinion monopoly likely to change?  Only if it is replaced by some global Chinese medium or some new trusted Internet medium.  Both are unlikely.

Advertising Failure

My best-selling book, Marketing Without Advertising, explains why advertising doesn’t work except on children's products and for tourists. The book explains how to do effective marketing.

A wonderful example is in today's Wall Street Journal, (8/3/2023). 

Bud Light, the most popular American beer, insulted its clients with a frivolous marketing character who is a man dressed as a woman and being silly.  Sales since the ad campaign have fallen 26% and market share has fallen from 10% to the 6% range.

Bud Light increased its national ads from 32 TV ads the same time last year, June and July,  to 34,000 this year (yes, from 2 digits to 5 digits).  While market share dropped 2% points from 8% to 6% during the same period.

Three cheers for the evidence that advertising, even at the million dollar level, is counter productive.

Fixing San Francisco

Now I’m ready to fix San Francisco.  A Japanese friend is arriving with her family and because I can’t handle guests right now I didn’t invite them to stay with me. But then I looked up the hotel they chose.  I told them to cancel the hotel and stay with me.

The hotel they found is the BEI Wyndham that rates itself a 4 star.  In fact it is at most a 1- star in a civic center neighborhood with a large and drug addled homeless population like most of downtown San Francisco. Dangerous. It also adds a $30 resort fee for each day and never mentions the fee. No resort features, not even night stands or a desk in the room. No good restaurants within five blocks. 

My mind immediately went to Sodom and Gomorrah which God destroyed because the citizens mistreated visitors.  San Francisco is Sodom and Gomorrah for sure.

So how do we fix San Francisco?

1. We find a leader of the Asian Community and have them select a new mayor and a group of supervisors.  The Asian Community has already organized a special election to replace a communist district attorney and an idiot school board. They won easily.
2. We vote on a ballot initiative to put 5 city-wide supervisors on the 9 member Board of Supervisors. The current board is elected by district and has been since 1978.  We have a bunch of totally incompetent people that never have the City as a whole as a concern.

All of this will take about five years.  Once the quiescent city leaders see that this is a path to decency they will support it.  

The negative is that the City will have a well-run government.  The weak governments of the past 175 years has meant San Francisco has been one of the most creative and vital cities in the world and most recently created the Beatniks, the Hippies and the Gay community. That global source of innovation may be lost.  

The alternative is Sodom and Gomorrah, which I can no longer countenance.

Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier

I’ve spent my life trying to understand hysteria and made little progress.  That means it is at least four dimensional or greater.  I’ve solved some very difficult three dimensional social problems.  See here.

This title ‘Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier’ is something that president Joe Biden says often in public and has absolutely no meaning.  (1) It is a subject of hysteria because it is uniquely a sign of mental impairment in the president that is not mentioned either in ordinary public conversation, in the vast global media, nor in political fencing.  (2) Just as an unplanned large crowd is part of hysteria, just as tens of thousands turning out the night Dan White (a political San Francisco murderer) was given a judicial slap on the wrist for killing the mayor and the popular gay supervisor, the absence of any discussion anywhere, the silence, about this Biden mental synapse is also hysterical.

(3) Hysteria can be a consensus of opinion that is so strong people act on it.  That applies to the trans-American belief in the 1980s that child kidnapping was common, in the hundreds of thousands a year, so common that most Americans in urban areas kept their children home when not in school. A radical change from the decades before. Behavior that remained in the decades afterward. In fact the number of kidnapped children never changed as measured by national data. (Slightly over 100 per year in the U.S)

I conceive the hysteria space as multi-dimensional; inside the hysterical part is the human brain or mind and connected to a vast number of similar people (I can’t define similar but it can be over 1 billion).  The hysterical space has dimensional components that have multiparts which can be thought of as rooms,  (A) One part that provides instant communication to the entire space or any subset. This can be a crowd or a herd, the common conception of a mass behavior. 

(B) Another part can be a view, a perspective, a vision, an idea.  Think of it as a room. Everyone in the room, all the brains and minds in there, share this same perspective.

(C) Another space is like an anechoic chamber.  No signals pass from one person to another.  That is like the silence about Joe Biden’s spoken nonsense.

(D) Still another space is a core belief that is the ground for a whole set of worldviews.  Think of these core rooms where everyone in it thinks money is a driving motive for all people. Another room where everyone thinks power is the driving motive for all people.  These are core-view rooms. Part of the multidimensional hysterical structure.

Because this hysteria is a multidimensional space, individuals can be in multiple rooms at the same time with different assortments of other people.

Now as I begin to recognize hysteria, I see that many elements resemble what I have taught as social thought.  Social thought recognizes overarching ideas as the coherent structures of institutions.  In some ways this is analogous to the rooms or dimensions of hysteria.

The difference being that hysteria is much more pervasive in life while social thought is bounded by institutional perimeters.  People who are part of a university can be part of many institutions simultaneously other than the university and can move to another institution easily. While people who are inside the hysteria that has them believing they were sexually abused by their step father can not change their opinion readily.

How will the multidimensional nature of hysteria be measured and validated?  I have no idea. We live in a universe where most of the forces are invisible but over time they are slowly being detected.  This is another one. 

Reply to Letter From Alex

Alex, is a good friend of mine who lives in Canada. He sent me an article from the NYTtimes on the Japanese stock market. Many people send me Times articles knowing I can’t read the paper because it’s Jew hate is so deeply offensive. 

After my recent month in Tokyo I bought a Japanese ETF that reflects the whole Japanese market.  

Some mistakes in the Times article.  Tourism has not returned from China, which is the largest source of all tourism and tourist spending. That will be a great infusion when it comes.  Mostly affects department stores and hotels.

Warren Buffett bragging on the Japanese stock market is right about Japan and wrong about the trading companies he bought stock in; which is something he can't understand. The biggest trading company was my client. Trading companies can never return a net on sales much over 2-3%. But they will grow with international trade.

The China boogie man will disappear with a Trump reelection.  China is not being aggressive, we are.

Japan is strong, healthy and solving the stagnant population issue.  All good signs.  They are not nuts about 'woke' in any way.  More women are coming into the labor market; working lives are getting longer and the Japanese are not stupid about CO2 and oil.  

A well-educated, honest, hard-working population is always a good bet.  None of the rampant American crime, Trump derangement syndrome, or divisive 'woke' culture.  The Japanese are happy, optimistic and enjoying the best of modernity.  The Covid did not hit them seriously; they are inherently clean, willing to wear masks (still 90% are masking in public) and still on good trading terms with India, China, Russia and most of the Middle East.

YoMama

Do you know ‘the dozens’?

In the mid 1950s, as an undergrad at the U. of Chicago,  I had two black friends. One rich one poor. The rich one was the son of a taxi cab company owner who taught me about ‘the dozens’ and the other was an anti-racism activist who was supported by the students at Roosevelt College.

The rich one told me about a common black practice of men facing off against each other, before an audience, to master trading insults.  Most started with ‘Yo mama.’.  

One was “Yo mama is so fat when huggin’ her you have to take a piece of chalk in your hand to mark where you began.” He told me many of these.  The dozens seem to have come from Ghana.

One ‘Yo mama’ had become a jazz classic ascribed to Hoagy Carmichael, Huggin and Chalkin.

He also told me about cursing contests.  The object was to curse as long as possible without repeating.  The one I remember was ‘You ain’t nothing but a lying dillydapper, your heart pumps shit and you breathe through your asshole….. 

I later learned that my grandfather Henry J. Phillips had been a famous cursor in San Francisco Union Square in the period after WWI. He had once cursed for 30 minutes without repeating.  He had a dental office on Union Square.

The poor friend took me with him to a white barbershop on 63rd where he asked for a haircut.  The barber called the police.  It was my job to be present to keep the police from beating up my friend on the way to the police car and to bail him out.  The knowledge that this fellow was a friend of mine led to the most successful and important employment discrimination lawsuit in American history. Described in two blogs. Here and here.

Understanding America

I look at my fellow Jews who are Lefty and very close to being self-hating Jews.  Their love of the Democrat party is shocking now that it is obvious that the Left wants Jews dead.  Academia hates Jews as does the NYTimes and the other mainstream media.  Hollywood and the power elite want us dead and want the Palestinians to wipe us out.

As Ruth Wisse points out, the vast European Jewish immigration beginning in 1885 are Lefties and have been The Left since they arrived.  These people never understood where they landed nor did they try.  They lived firmly in the ignorant socialist communist world that they came from. No one ever tried to help them open their eyes and see where they had landed.

The 20th century passed these sad settlers by.  It wasn’t an American Constitutional Republic that elected Hitler and followed Stalin in the slaughter of Jewish children and their feeble protectors.  It was a strong central government that continued the pogroms of Europe.

America had two things that Jews failed to appreciate.  A government deliberately designed to be weak and grass roots. A Constitution that deliberately created a divided government run by a multitude of weak states.  And a set of Amendments designed to protect individuals and minorities.  

That is all anyone needs to know to understand and appreciate America.  Since the Jews have arrived, most of them have been part of the political movement to thwart these historic Constitutional powers.  Jews were fanatic supporters of FDR in his desire to erase Supreme Court power, to weaken state governments and the ceaseless drive of the Democrats to shackle industry, support unions and control every aspect of American life.  

America did have an hereditary elite that was anti-Jew, but Jews never noticed when, uniquely on the planet, the hereditary elite disappeared in America at the end of the 1950s.  Jews still haven’t noticed.

America did not have laws regulating Jews’ clothing or the businesses Jews could enter.  It did restrict Jews from Harvard and the elite schools but that was not like Europe where they were vastly circumscribed in every domain. 

Now the big question.  Why didn’t Jews realize that America was the great haven for them?  Jews who came before 1885 did see this and they saw that the hereditary elites were weak outside New England.  They moved everywhere else in America as my great-grandfather did.  But the mass later arrivals never left New York, never left socialism, communism and labor unions.  To this day, they have been cloistered Ghetto Jews who never left the Lefty ghetto of New York.

I Was Wrong

A few blogs back I attributed a large part of the current employment dump in high-tech to widespread understanding, from Elon Musk’s example, that more than half of tech employees are a waste.  I was wrong.  Musk found a commercial truth but his fellow tech managers are not smart enough to appreciate his discovery.

What is going on, and has been for half a year, is the consequence of the most ignorant idiotic government foreign action I’ve ever seen.  The Biden government directed American companies to stop doing business in Russia.  Many complied.  Far too many.  The U.S. government has no such power and even one company could have held up such a directive in courts for many years.

So now those American tech giants who pulled out of Russia have been slaughtered.  Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and a dozen others.  

Every business man on the planet looked at the American high-tech obsequiousness to a senile president and said ‘Am I going to buy high-tech software from a company that will not service me in the future if the American government is hostile to my government?’  The answer from any intelligent businessman anywhere in the world was ‘Hell no’.  Screw American high-tech, I’ll find a company somewhere else.

The American Democrat administration didn’t just do this stupid thing.  It banned Russia from using the global banking system SWIFT controlled by the U.S. which makes the dollar the universal planetary currency.

Now, the 100 nations on the planet, who are anti-American, are looking for ways to make the Yuan a major trading currency.  They will succeed and it will raise interest rates in the U.S., reduce American exports dramatically and cause a recession.  Maybe a long one. Good going, you Democrat anti-commerce idiots.

Business in Tokyo

The effects of covid on Tokyo are minor compared to the U.S.  Their schools were not impacted; education is far more important to the Japanese.  

Working from home on computers and Zoom was anticipated. The Japanese firm where I was the key partner (Dynax) did the research on distance working in the mid-1990s. The clients were Mitsubishi and Toshiba.

Only based on appearances in Tokyo, it looks like babies and strollers are everywhere.  My sources give credit to unlimited free child care and free education at very good schools.

Two interesting new businesses.  Vape shops and second-hand handbag shops.  

Vape technology comes from China and I’m told there is something new every month.  The American government has put vaping nearly out of business. We’re Puritans who act purely out of religious conviction.  But we’re missing an interesting global business which we have dominated for a century. The coffee shops are all responding with two separate smoking rooms.  One for tobacco-based products and another for vapes.

The second-hand handbags is a fascinating business. First, remember the richest man in the world makes his money in fashion handbags.  It's a big global money maker.  Second, Japan, to create real equity, and avoid social envy, has for centuries provided the poor with cheap versions of what the rich have. Cotton purses for one, silk for the other.

Foreign relations. I find many of my friends in the Japanese Foreign Office saying Japan has to have its own nukes.  The American nuclear umbrella no longer works with the American global suzerainty gone and a corrupt senile president in office. When Israel is forced to bomb Iran that will be a sign that the Japanese have to be prepared to act alone.

I congratulated one of my longtime friends on her most unusual contribution to society.  In the fifty years I’ve been coming to Japan I have seen a stunning change in clothing.  She played a role in that with many art and fashion shows, galleries and her close relations to Issey Miyaki.  The Japanese have always been cleaner and neater than any other people but they are now pure fashion.  Everyone.  

My female partner and I sat in a coffee shop for over an hour just watching the passing fashion show. Colorful, gorgeous fabrics and tailoring, elegant choice of separate pieces including bags, hair and accessories.  But don’t be surprised by the common athletic shoes and weird socks.  A’la Helen Mirren.  One of our Tokyo friends got recognition from the Emperor for her lifetime achievements in art, fashion and design.  It is visible everywhere.

Taxis in Tokyo now use a special model from Toyota.  Large interior with space for baggage in front and very easy access.

I don’t want to go home. In Japan, everything works.  In San Francisco nothing works and everything is getting worse. Recently a security guard shot a black thief who attacked him and the DA who was recently elected by the outraged S.F. Asian electorate refused to charge the guard with murder.  The black criminal underclass went on full protest mode in response.

San Francisco needs the vigilantes we once had and another 1906 earthquake to start over again.

I would stay in Tokyo if it didn’t mean leaving my friends and a large family behind.

Why We Are Divided

What had to be gone first, what was in place already and what was new that brought this division about?

Over fifteen million Americans served in the military in WWII.  College graduates usually became officers.  It was a source of civil behavior and meritocracy.  The rest of society accepted civility as a military necessity.

When the war was over the civility that had been needed and created after the end of the American Civil War with civic groups, dissolved. Membership in the Masons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Lions, scouts and others shrank to insignificance.

More importantly, the meritocratic military officers entered the labor force and rose to the top ranks of the fifty major corporations; they formed hundreds more corporations and displaced the source of power for the American hereditary elite. By 1960 the hereditary elite was so disrupted and displaced that it no longer published the Black Book of membership (actually red) and the debutante balls sponsored by local hereditary elites were replaced with non-profit sponsors.  

America entered a period of rapid corporate expansion, globalization and technological innovation.

The absence of the hereditary elite left the second most powerful institution in control in urban areas: labor unions. Labor unions came quickly to control the politics of every metropolitan area to this day.  Unions are seniority-oriented, very rule based and are deeply anti-meritocratic.

Two other lesser institutions gained power and prominence after the fall of the hereditary elite and civic organizations.  Academia which had been Marxist for most of the 20th century took over the intellectual world and the media. 

Prison values took over fashion in pants to the knees and rap which uniquely had performers being murdered wantonly. Big bands and rock groups had never been homicidal.

All of this allowed a long simmering division in America to become visible and important as populations moved; white families left bused school cities for the suburbs and young Lefties moved to urban centers after college.

Then came the most powerful force to hit the vulnerable United States and Israel, the new social media on the Internet.  The self-fulfilling mirror.

The extraordinary impact of the Internet is not obvious.  The Internet and social media allowed individuals to expand their personal and political worldview to prominence and full blown significance.  Millions of people who played little or no role in prior civic life or politics all of a sudden had a vehicle to publish and voice their opinions in a semi public way and find allies to align with.

Voila, we had a divided America and a similar Israel where hatred could be expressed openly and civil behavior was drastically diminished.

A whole new phenomenon where individuals expanded their opinion persona and found sympathizers among strangers.

Welcome to divided America. Welcome to angry Americans.

 

Let Me Try

One of my longtime readers objected to a statement a few blogs back where I called the Democrat Party the ‘party of hate.’  I apologized for using such intemperate language, and explained what drove me to it. 
There is no excuse. My explanation was that it is my reaction to the rising and very dangerous Jew Hate in my beloved country, America. And that Jew Hate has found a comfortable home among Democrats, journalists, academics and other lefties.

I am now in Tokyo, where I see none of the recriminations and political venom that is out of control in America.  Maybe I can think about the reasons for this period of terrible anguish at home.  Anguish that is tearing families apart.

It is very worthwhile mentioning, as I did in the last blog, that I’m reading Bibi’s autobiography.  A brilliant book where the subject is his brother, Joni, who was murdered leading the first great airplane terrorist recovery, Entebbe, and then the subject shifts to his wife Sara.  An autobiography in reflection.  I might try it myself.

The whole point of bringing up Bibi is that the Israeli press and the Labor Left hate Bibi with the same malice and venom of the American press and the Democrat Party towards decent honest Republicans.  

I personally knew Richard Nixon, I knew several cabinet members of Ronald Reagan’s.  So I felt personally the endless mindless attacks on them.  And now for seven years I’ve watched with absolute horror the outrageous lies, hatred and constitutionally illegal villainy poured on Donald Trump and his family.  So where does this daily national bile come from?

While the toxic spleen may have boiled over for Bibi and Trump, it has been with us for half a century. The Left hated Nixon and Senator McCarthy from 1950.  It has only grown since then.

Unlike Jew hate, there is no social opprobrium.  Lefties feel free to pour out their acrimony with little or no restraint in public.  They are even self-righteous on many occasions.

What is it and why has it metastasized?

Two disappearances are central to what has happened.  

• The Army and the draft that went with it.  I was in the Army. We all got along even in peacetime and we accommodated each other despite wild differences in social class, politics and background.
• Civic organizations evaporated. We lost the Odd Fellows, the Lions, the Masonic Order, Kiwanis and a dozen others. These organizations created civility.  The Army satisfied the civility role and may have been the reason for their disappearance.

Religions promptly split along political lines in the 1960s.  Reform Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians on the left and Baptists and Evangelicals on the conservative side.

• Unions took over nearly every city as I’ve explained before with the collapse of the hereditary elite and union values of anti-meritocracy triumphed in the public square.
• Prison values took over the fashion world.
• Importantly the long-standing Marxist suzerainty of academia took over the intellectual world and the media. 
• Finally the Internet plays a role but not for the popular reason that it gives individuals a public outlet. The Internet gave each participant a place to vent and curate their political views among allies and potential converts.

There you have it.  

Six institutional forces that divided America with a venom that we have not seen since the 1850s Democrat-Republican divide.

Japan never got the divisions because it never lost its hereditary elite.  Israel got the divisive illness  because it had a monstrously powerful labor and socialist overlord. 

I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I will summarize in the next blog.

Arrived in Tokyo

Four years of covid have kept me from my beloved Tokyo.  I have been coming to Japan for nearly 50 years, usually for two months; once longer and now mostly for one month.

What is the difference between Tokyo and San Francisco?  The food is spectacular here, every meal.  In the past I’ve had horse and whale and today I had ox tongue.  I love horse,  some variations of whale are interesting, the tongue was grilled in tiny pieces; it was not as interesting as boiled cow tongue.  I also had clam chowder on a hot dog.  Not as bad as it sounds. Plenty of good espresso.

Everyone on the street is immaculately dressed, immaculately. Much of it is exquisite. 

Everything works; buses are to the minute, trains are to within 30 seconds and clean, clean spotless.  This is a dense city of 40 million compared to dirty S.F. 850,000. 

The biggest surprise is to walk through stores, giant department stores and all the merchandise is out.  Everyone pays for what they take.  In San Francisco, much of the merchandise is behind plastic doors with locks and the merchandise that isn’t is loaded by the criminal underclass into bags to be stolen.

In San Francisco, we now get electric outages on days of good weather, floods from the underground water pipes that aren’t maintained and hypodermic needles nearly everywhere we walk in commercial areas and East of Van Ness. Along with the vast numbers of street people.  Street people use public transportation making it smell awful.  Use of public transport has dropped so low it can no longer survive.

Downtown San Francisco is empty, I’m not exaggerating.  Tourists are few and largely European.  Over ten thousand retail businesses have failed in the City.

I don’t miss the foul life of San Francisco and contemporary America. And we live in a prosperous neighborhood.

It is hard to ignore the idea that America is a failed state. The goal of the military is to ‘fight global warming.’  Enlistment has fallen catastrophically.  Nearly every college and university teaches that America has endemic racism and that meritocracy is malignant white supremacy. No society can survive that self image.

The worst of America is the rapid rise of Jew hate.  No society has ever survived Jew hate, certainly not modern Russia, Poland; Spain or East Europe. 

I’m reading the autobiography of Bibi.  Really great.  History will record that I lived in the time of Bibi and Elon and that I appreciated them both.

Sushi for lunch today.  I only eat sushi in Japan.  Four years without sushi.  Only sushi chefs in Japan love raw fish enough to understand how to recognize high quality fish, cut it, prepare it and serve it.

My goodness, the dollar is strong and the yen is weak for the moment.  I am enjoying my new found wealth.  It's temporary.

Japanese small businesses were not hurt too badly by covid.  Small businesses are financed by their landlords, their suppliers and their neighbors.  American small businesses are only financed by friends and family.  Seldom deep pockets.

Department stores were hurt during covid because tourism, especially Chinese tourism, evaporated.  The Japanese equivalent of Amazon, Rakuten, has hurt too.  Home delivery never got as big for the Japanese as it did in the U.S.  Different ways of shopping and cooking.

Uber is insignificant in Tokyo.  There are so many taxis and they are everywhere.  They are clean, they are immaculate.  Very different from the U.S. yellow cabs.

The Japanese had a tiny fraction of the covid of the U.S. because they are so clean to start with. But still 9 out of 10 people wear masks in public.  I think it is because they are naturally shy.

Bohemian Club

Evil fools have brought the Bohemian Club into the news recently.  The hatred that the Party of Hate (Democrats) has brought to Justice Thomas has boiled over to the Bohemian Club, where he was invited to visit, claiming it to be some domestic version of Davos.

It isn’t a domestic version of Davos. In fact the only significant event is the two-week summer camp at the Bohemian Grove on the Russian River.  A few famous people have been invited, including a few Republican presidents.  The club is not elite.  Many of my friends have been and are members. There is nothing elite or sinister about us.

Otherwise the most interesting part of the Club's history is that in the late 1880s and 1890s the local social elite, including the hereditary social elite, decided to exclude Jews from the three main clubs and the two women’s clubs.  This was during the great wave of East European Jewish immigration from the late 1880s to the mid 1920s. 

The Jews who had, since the founding of the City, been important leaders and major businessmen simply took over the Bohemian Club for themselves.  Jews were the ones who bought the property on the Russian River and created the Grove and its traditions.  Remember Jews were a key component of the theatrical world at the time, so they humorously made that a part of the Club facade.

The looney haters in the media seem to take public urination as some sign of the Club’s perversity. It is a men’s club and there is a tradition of peeing on the redwood trees.  It is just a form of camaraderie.

It is a men’s club. By Federal law you cannot have a men’s only club with over 200 members if the club is important to business. The Bohemian Club bans all discussion of business and is in fact not important to any local business.

Nearly Everyone Fails to Understand

I never see anyone mention the most significant revolution in our society that is a central cause of the major changes in the past half-century.

The hereditary elite of America fell apart in the 1960’s.

The cause

The cause was the rise of the officer class in the military in WWII.  The U.S. military, which had for nearly a century gotten its officers from Southern military schools, was faced with a massive draft and expansion of the services into the millions. To meet the demand for officers the decision was made to make every college graduate an officer.  Only a dozen colleges were for the hereditary elite, so the thousands of other college graduates became a new meritocratic class.

When the new meritocratic leaders from the officer class left the Army, they moved swiftly into the upper ranks of modern commerce.  Some moved up the corporate ladder of the 100 largest companies and many others started new businesses that became important.

The few who climbed the corporate ladder replaced the hereditary elite and destroyed the main source of jobs and income for the hereditary elite class.  Without the jobs and money the elite provided for their own, the elite fell apart beginning in 1960; it was almost gone by the 1970’s.  By 1961 the institution was so weak it could no longer publish the New York Social Register.  (See photo.) The Debutante Balls were no longer sponsored by the local elites.

The image on the right is the last NY Social Register published by the elite’s own members. Its contents are interesting. Each person’s home address(es) and phone(s) are listed with the schools they went to and all the private clubs they belong to. Only people listed could buy the register.  When traveling the country they usually visited each other.

I personally saw the elite collapse as a Vice President of one of the West Coast’s elite banks.  I was told to join a club. (Most clubs still didn’t accept Jews.) Clubs really mattered. The Bank President’s son came to me to ask if it was possible for him to marry his Asian girlfriend (not possible until 1970.)

The consequence

To understand the consequences of the lost hereditary elite, their role as the top social institution must be recognized. 

The elite's members were at the top of all American institutions including print and electronic media, the courts and the law, the military, the civic organizations (IOOF, Lions, Elks, Masons) and even the major Protestant religions.  The civic organizations were hit first in the 1950’s and were ghosts by 1960. The major Protestant religions were hit next (Unitarians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopals) and were empty pews by 1965.  Catholics and Jews were never allowed membership in the hereditary elite, so they didn’t suffer the same fate.

The second largest and most powerful institution in America was the labor unions.  Being almost entirely urban, they replaced the hereditary elite and took over nearly every city in America.  The correct name for the public face of the unions is ‘the Democrat Party.’ By 1975, every city with over half a million people in America, was under total control by the local unions; union leaders have run cities to this day.

The third largest institution in America turns out to be ex-felons. The reason ex-felons are important is that they comprise between 7 to 10 million persons, more than half black and they influence young black males.  Men become felons before age 20 and prison comprises the bulk of their life experience. Prison life is homogeneous, the most homogeneous experience outside the military.

Prison experience impacts fashion: pants below the butt. It impacts woke values: ‘blacks are systemically oppressed’ and ‘police target blacks’ are prison views of the world.  Music since the early 1990s has had a great deal of rap, the sounds of prison life.

I haven’t included the impact of the dissolution of the hereditary elite on education and academia.  The elite was never in power outside of the elite schools; Marxism was a main force from before WWII. The ideology was re-invigorated from 1970 onward by Michel Foucualt and Herbert Marcuse.

Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Good Side

It is readily apparent that America without oil and gas energy will be forced to reduce its living standards.  I ignore the race and gender wars provoked by the ‘woke’ and the absurd anti-merit elements of the woke agenda because Americans will survive the turmoil of the first two and will never accept the anti-merit propositions.

America will not grow. America will learn to live at a zero growth rate. Simple living will be a pervasive choice.

I have long supported the simple living life model and wrote a book Simple Living Investments for Old Age. Of course I had simple living as a voluntary choice, not as a failure of the economic system.

From my vantage point, a simple living America will be more relaxed, will have many more small businesses, be far happier and we will have more artistic people.  America’s vigor will be channeled into new creative outlets.  The Briarpatch was a vital and exciting world.  Part of the hippy domain that I would be happy to relive.

The benefits for the world would be magnificent. One-third of the world lives in a tribal environment and that part does not want modern commerce.  They are happy with tribal life and don’t want the ever plundering modern encroachment on their lives.  That part of the world has already enjoyed the better food supplies and the improved health of the past half century.  Tribal peoples, the world over will be happy to live their tribal lives.

Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Bad Side

There are many ways to put this but the simplest and clearest for all my readers who have never left the U.S, for those who probably never will and for the few who will leave the U.S. but will not visit the two thirds of the world that is never seen by tourists: what Americans are doing to ourselves and what Americans want other humans to do to themselves is unacceptable.

We want the two thirds of the world that is poor, without cars and without a surfeit of food to suffer. We want them to live with what they have now or to live with less.  

That is what ‘woke America’ and ‘woke Europe’  is asking of the world.  ‘You poor people of the world are to live without oil, natural gas and live in societies that disdain merit.  Whatever you have now you should have less of it.’  

Don’t worry too much about us Americans.  We are already rich and live with an abundant surplus of everything.  

Despite what the ‘woke Americans’ say about the barriers to women and blacks in America, the 200 American women billionaires own more money than all the people in the poorest 50 countries in the world earn in a year and the 10 wealthiest black Americans own more than all the people in Liberia earn in a year.

 

Joel Kotkin Again

Kotkin has again come through with the most brilliant and clear statement about our current state of world affairs.

The Ukraine has made three new world alliances visible.

Here is the final sentence in his dire but vital prediction:

“Until the West wakes up from its self-referential slumbers, the tide of history may turn out less friendly to Ukraine’s loyal friends than to those who either abet aggression or maintain a steady indifference.”

The Longest Boom

I was actually trained as an economist but the U.C. Berkeley econ department was so Marxist that I was saved from the misery of becoming a PhD econ professor.  My special interests were the definition of capital and business cycles aka Wesley Mitchell.

In earlier blog posts I’ve pointed out that the current inflation was caused by the Biden suppression of American oil production on his first day in office.  The current inflation (and the one in the 1970s) had nothing to do with deficit spending, the classic economic theory to explain inflation.

Since the beginning of the Biden inflation the Federal Reserve has been trying to fight it using the classic econ model of raising the core interest rate.  In theory raising the interest rate is intended to suppress capital investment (return on investment is supposed to be tied to base interest return) which will lead to a recession.  Since this is a wrong analysis it isn’t working.

In fact we have had the longest economic expansion in the history of the world, fourteen years.

The reason for this is not understood by anyone in economics.  The cause is simple.  America is the recipient of much of the computer and Internet revenues of the whole planet.  The cell phone networks, the computers, and everything related to them create money that pours into the American economy.  This money is of such great magnitude that it swamps the ebbs and flows of the traditional American economy.

The longest previous economic expansion was from 1991 to 2001, ten years.  That long expansion was due to the end of the Cold War and the transfer of capital spending from military to civilian investments.

The current expansion is from 2009 to the present, fourteen years so far.  Don’t pay attention to the dip in 2020 due to the economic freeze of the Covid interruption.  It had nothing to do with economic forces; it was a government-induced suppression of business.

We get to watch the longest economic expansion and see how incredible it is.

My Friend Dick Rosenberg

Another obituary; Dick died a week ago.  The other obits I’ve seen about Dick are accurate but lack the personal elements.

I knew Dick when I helped start the Marketing Research department at the Bank of America and then started a national organization of my fellow bank marketing officers. 

When I started my new job at the Bank of California, I went next door to let my friend, Dick, at Wells Fargo know about it.  There were two other marketing men in his office.  That was the meeting that created the future MasterCard.

Dick and I saw each other regularly for the next three years.  Later, when he was president of Bank of America I phoned him to get his help on a project of mine.  I wanted to create an index of the weighted major five global currencies to be used as a standard international currency for internal use in reporting financial statements for multinational corporations.  Dick remembered me after two decades.  He said he was getting rid of his international currency department and couldn’t help.

Dick was a genius exemplified by his purchase of Security Pacific National Bank. He knew, as I did, that all big organizations had internal politics that are very damaging to management.  He picked a top executive at Security and promised him a raise of $5 million to tell him who was productive at Security and who wasn’t.  After he bought and merged the banks he fired the losers and put his friend on the newly merged Board of Directors.

I saw Dick often, after he retired, at the symphony.  He liked symphonic music and was a big financial supporter.

Dick was a very smart man, with a great sense of humor and a warmth that I can never forget.

I Knew the Key People

It's time for me to start commenting on my history with the key people in the history of the modern computer.

Start with Doug Engelbart.  I knew Doug from my monthly board meeting of the Portola Institute in Menlo Park.  Doug was part of a circle of Menlo friends, most of whom were runners.  I visited Doug’s office at SRI by invitation once.  He is credited with inventing the mouse.  His mouse was clunky and had 6 keys on it.  Those were the days when we did line editing.  Each change required citing the line and replacing the whole line, even for a change of one letter.  Doug’s office had a small monitor that matched one on the other side of a wall.  The goal was to write back and forth between the monitors.

Another friend, a very close friend of ten years, Stewart Brand, helped Doug to present his work to the public in San Francisco. Doug, with Stewart’s help, created the ‘Mother of All Demos.’

Stewart deserves a role as a personal and Internet computer father but has not been credited in his recent biography.  Stewart convened the first Hackers’ Conference.  Hackers were the backbone of the personal computer.  Stewart also created the Well, the first active and long lasting community website.

My other friend from that circle was Bill English.  Bill created and ran the Xerox PARC research center for nearly 15 years. PARC was the source of much if not most of the personal computer.  Steve Jobs has publicly admitted that most of the first Apples came from PARC.  Bill, as manager, will not get the credit he deserves.  But people who understand management will know that he is responsible for the dozens of brilliant inventions that came out of his project.

Bill and I were on the board of the Point Foundation (Whole Earth Catalog money).  We met quarterly for three years all day.  His wife Roberta was a good friend.  I spent time with them both in Tokyo where Bill was trying to create a Japanese keyboard.  His system wasn’t used.

Lastly, I have had daily coffee for fifteen years with Scott Prevost who developed natural language for Microsoft’s Bing, then created AI for Adobe, a leader in the field.  Scott is certainly a prime mover in AI.

All four of these men look like Prince Charles, now King Charles.  Only Stewart is not an engineer.  All four would prefer not to carry on a social conversation.  Except for Stewart you would not look twice at any of them, you wouldn’t try to seek them out for a discussion.  But all were/are calm, moderate, subdued and kind.  Their conversation was intelligent but never provocative.  Again, except for Stewart none had interests outside of work, except Bill loved Japan and Japanese art and Scott is interested in the politics of the gay male community.

All were/are confident, strong, honest and very male.

Judy Heumann

I knew and loved Judy, who died at 75 a few days ago.

Her obituaries fail to mention Ed Roberts, her partner in the Disability Movement.  I give Judy credit for being the mother of the movement but never has the role of a father been clearer; Ed Roberts was the father and the prime mover of the movement. The true founder of a global revolution.

Ed’s disabilities were so great that he was severely limited in his daily movement.  Judy did all the things that Ed needed.  Judy was in a wheelchair but she had energy, administrative skills and mobility that Ed lacked.

This obituary has one purpose. To contrast Ed and Judy.  I loved Judy; she was kind, deeply caring and honest (meaning frank).  But the disability movement succeeded because of Ed. 

Go back and take the time to read my obituary of Ed.  A man who stood out from history with his incredibly intense humanity.  When you met Ed you felt the meaning of being human. Ed moved our hearts.

Judy used the shaming and victimhood methodology of political action.  She was effective because her anger was moderate and because Ed had opened the doors of the world.

I once asked Judy why men were attracted to her, as they were.  She said it was the injured bird syndrome.  Many men see an injured bird and they want to help. A wonderful part of maleness.

My Big Date

I am reminded of my big date, when I recently cleaned and washed Miners' Lettuce.

In the early 1970s I attended a casual soiree at the San Francisco Zen Center (relevant later) where I met an attractive woman and invited her to my house for dinner.  

I then asked around about who she was.  It turned out she was a rising star in the chef-restaurant world.  Her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was already globally famous.

The night of the dinner arrived and my solution to serving a famous chef was to collect local ingredients.  One dish was Miner’s Lettuce since it was Spring and growing nearby in San Francisco. I collected a separate salad of five local greens from the parklet next door. I drove out to get wild spinach from the point near Sutro Baths.

She was due at 7PM.  I started the main course and lit the hearth fire.  Then she phoned to say she would be two hours late, delayed by a wine sales rep.

When she finally arrived, everything was wilted and reheated.

When she saw the Miner’s Lettuce she expressed horror and shock.  She and her father had just lost $200,000 on a Central Valley farm trying to commercially grow Miner’s Lettuce and failed.

She later asked about the apple in my five layer dessert.  ‘Yes’ I had cut the apple on the same board that I had cut onions.

I fell asleep after this disaster and she left by herself. 

Years later, when I was the founder of Green’s Restaurant,  we sent Debbie Madison, our future first chef, to study for a year as a cook at Chez Panisse.  Debbie was a student at the Zen Center.

City of Anarchy

There is no leading anarchist theorist that I can refer to.  I know many of the anarchist writers, a few of whom wrote in the post-Civil War period.  Anarchy theory has always assumed that small groups of people, size of the groups is seldom specified, will self-organize and that a government structure, whether kingship or democracy will not be needed.

The most salient attribute of an anarchist society is the absence of a police or military.

Most public functions in an anarchist society are locally self-organized like fire brigades, water supplies, roads and sewers.  Some anarchist models have private enterprise organizations and others are more kibbutz-like.

No anarchist has seen anything like what we have today.  An entire city with all the traditional city services and functions but no functional government.  San Francisco, a leader in most other areas, is now the first truly anarchist city on a scale of 800,000 people.

The city government doesn’t work.  Taxes are collected and salaries to 33,000 city employees are paid as are the pensions of retired employees.  But virtually no one works. Streets are rarely repaired, a few fire stations, very few, respond to fire calls but there are three times as many fire personnel as are needed. Most importantly the police, which operate at one-third of the standard street patrol staffing level, seldom carry out police functions because the police know that the courts and District Attorney will not prosecute most arrests. A small proportion of crimes are reported, and they only result in filing a paper on an internet form.

Pretty amazing.  Crime is up, especially minor crimes. Anarchy works fairly well.  Few people complain.  Crime is a nuisance that results in complaining but most people live with it.

In a large established prosperous city where most life is established and functioning, anarchy works.

(Footnote to the photo: I created and promoted the first 'painted ladies' postcard for my Third World Tours.)

Medieval Cleaning

There is an online fact site that seems to be very popular, Quora, which is consistently wrong on one point.  I just wanted to set the matter straight.

Quora is consistently asked whether people in the Medieval period took baths or cleaned themselves significantly.  The answer is always ‘yes’ and the readers are told that taking a bath in a large tub was common.  

The first problem with this answer is that it doesn’t refer to any geography.  The questioners are probably talking about people in Europe.  In this case Quora is completely wrong in the answer.

In Finland, Hungary and Turkey, the citizens regularly took steam baths, used bathing pools or saunas throughout history.  The same is true in Japan.  In the areas of West Africa that I am familiar with, bathing was ubiquitous.  This was also true, much earlier, in the Roman Empire.

For the rest of Europe, bathing and washing the body was not done.  The popular theories of the time were that being unwashed was healthy and deterred skin infections.  Additionally the smells of everyday life were so egregious that covering one’s body with notions was necessary to survive the fetid smells of everyday life.  Sewer systems were unknown in the English-speaking and European worlds.

All of this is readily determined by reading the literature of the time.  The Japanese were so offended by the horrid smell of Europeans, they were made to stand outside during all encounters with Japanese and forced to live on a separate island.  Africans reacted the same way to Europeans as did Muslims to the Crusaders.

In summary, most Europeans for 1,000 years didn’t bathe or wash.  Many other parts of the world testify to the foul smells of Europe.

What Happened?

Elon Musk happened.  Nearly all the big tech companies laid off workers in large numbers within the past few months of 2022 and 2023.

This seems to be a big secret.  None of the media reports what just happened.  I want historians to know first- hand.

Two things happened.

• The first was that Elon Musk bought the online site twitter.com and proceeded to fire 2/3rds of the employees.  Roughly 5,000 employees out of 7,500. What everyone in management around the world realized was that the company ran just as well or better with the remaining ⅓ of the employees (2,500.)  Fellow tech companies were forced to question whether the same excess of employees was also a problem of theirs. They proceeded to fire many employees.
• The second was that many tech companies withdrew operations from Russia on orders from the U.S. government.  As I said in an earlier blog, every company in the world that uses American tech immediately had reason to doubt the reliability of American tech companies in providing continuing maintenance support.  Since competitors have not fully entered the market, the full impact is still a long way off but the initial impact was evident in year- end 2022 tech sales data. Firing followed.

Any action by Elon Musk is significant.  Mr. Musk is a technical and a managerial genius of historic proportions.  He created the first successful electric car in this century, the Tesla, which has the largest global market as of this date and is very profitable.  He created the first successful commercial space rocket company in history. Musk’s SpaceX launched more successful rockets last year than NASA launched in its whole history.

Bed Bath Bad Marketing

Bed Bath just escaped the second threat of bankruptcy. But it won’t survive.

“At its peak in 2017, Bed Bath & Beyond had 1,560 stores with 65,000 employees, bringing in $12.3 billion in revenue. But in the nine months through November 2022, it posted sales of just $4.2 billion, and its headcount dwindled to fewer than 30,000.” said a past CEO.

BedBath was founded in 1971. It filled an important cluster of niches that were formerly many of the niches filled by department stores.  It was a smaller version of Macy’s with a greater selection in each category. 

The big marketing mistake was sending millions of 20% discount cards to everyone in their marketing areas.  That is a terrible marketing mistake.  It has the following problems:

• It tells everyone that the prices without the discount cards are too high.
• That ALL the prices are too high.
• That it is only worth shopping at the BedBath stores when the shopper has a recent discount card.
• It made it very hard for the company to have an online store.  Would an online store be 20% less all the time? Would it have a 20% discount at checkout?  

All national stores need an online outlet. Bed Bath was foreclosed from this  vital business option.

Management knew the problem but was trapped in this marketing nightmare.

“Like any form of promotion, it becomes a drug,” a former CEO said. Over the years, attempts to pull back on the mailings or reduce the discount backfired. “Once you’re addicted to it and your customer is addicted to it, it’s a very difficult thing to wean them off of.”

It is impossible to stop mail-out discounts.

Discount mail-outs work for grocery stores because so much inventory is seasonal and the effect is to be a seasonal reminder. Such grocery mailers are also for specific items that are sometimes temporary real loss leaders.

This is a lesson for all businesses.  Sales of any type are risky unless done with a specific marketing goal in mind. Even then they are questionable.

Capitalism, AntiSemitism

Two words you won’t find me using.

Capitalism is part of the Marxist analysis of economics with capitalism as opposed to socialism and communism.  A meaningless economic category.  Russia may have a backward economy and China may have a command economy but both use capital in vast amounts and the capital is controlled by many different entities. 

Marx used a labor theory of value which is irrelevant and totally disparaged.  It is useless in explaining rents, prices of most goods including art, financial markets and most everything else.

Marx’s economic analysis is also wrong because he saw the world in Charles Dickens' terms based on the free labor that was sweeping into urban areas as newly efficient agriculture freed up workers. Workers who then moved into the new wage labor market in the early 1800s.  The rudiments of the modern economic world. The early stages of an economic system that didn’t last very long.

The basic flaw in Marxist analysis is that capital is found everywhere in the modern commercial world. Regardless of the type of economy.  For example, the U.S. government, including the military and national parks has more dollars of capital than all the top hundred global corporations put together, but the U.S. is called ‘capitalist’ by Marxists.

Capitalism is a meaningless term.  I use modern commerce. Which I further divide into trade (flower shops), industry (Lowes) and clientry (personal services like lawyer).

I don’t use anti-Semitism either.  Semitism is a sweet innocent word that comes from linguistics referring to a whole cluster of languages including Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Ugaritic and Ethiopian. A nice sweet word.  

Anti-Semites on the other hand murdered millions of my cousins painfully, barbarically, children, old people and anyone who was vaguely Jewish. Anti-Semites still want to murder Jews.  All Jews.  There is nothing nice or sweet for people who want to see me and my fellow Jews dead.  People who, to the last one, want the only home of us Jews, Israel, destroyed. 

Anti-Semites should be called what they are: Jew haters.  That is what I call them and that is what they deserve to be called.  Black, prominent or British upper class; they are haters and don’t deserve to live peacefully in a decent society.  Elijah Mohammed, Kanye West and Brian Eno are not decent people.

Jew haters certainly don’t deserve to be referred to with a trite anodyne term for a language group. They are not anti-Semites, they are Jew haters.

Israel Today

No one who follows this blog will fail to know that I am a strong supporter of Israel and consider Bibi one of the greatest leaders in all of Jewish history.  World history for that matter.

I lived in Israel in 1958-9 when Israel was a Kibbutz socialist heaven.  It was the heaven American Lefty-Jews still romanticize. 

Bibi has been a leader who changed Israel into the most successful nation driven by modern commerce and the most successful innovative nation on the planet.

The 60% of American Jews who vote Democrat and long for the lost socialist nation of Israel, are drifting away from support of Israel. The proportion of such Democrat Jews is growing.

First to understand why this drift is happening it helps to read Israeli news.

Sarah Rinder (Mosaic 1/23/2023) has found a way to demonstrate the distance that separates these American Jews from Israel.  Here is some contemporary popular Israeli music.  Compare it to American pop music and rap.

This music references the horror of living with Arabs who kill your fellow Israelis every day, every month and every year. Here is what Rinder says about the music and the singer:

“It raises the question of whether Ben-Ari’s biblicism and Jewish allusions are charming embellishments or so central to his work that they cannot be disentangled from it. But merely to ask this question is to acknowledge that Israeli society’s shared cultural touchstones appear to be growing more and more Jewish, and traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art.”

Unless and until Israel can move the Gaza and West Bank Arabs out of Israel, the division between Israel and American Lefty-Reform Jews will continue to grow.

My own naive solution to the Israeli-Arab problem is to pay some Arab nations to take the West Bank and Gaza Arabs who are ready to leave (those between 13 and 25 years old).   We could start with an offer of $1 billion to take 4,000 of these Arabs.  Plenty of Arab countries are corrupt enough to want the money.  

Once the process begins, most members of the U.S. Congress and most European nations will see this as a solution and it should catch on.

Deep Truth About Commerce

The modern world exists for one reason, one reason alone; modern commerce.  On the surface one sees technology as the vehicle for the miracles in the modern world, the movement of half the population on the planet out of poverty, short life-spans and away from hunger.  

Simple proof that technology is not the prime mover:  you don’t see the broad use and acceptance of technology in the parts of the world that don’t have modern commerce, areas such as most of Africa, large parts of Indonesia and vast tracts of the Middle East and the Steppes.

Modern commerce is the primary source of technology in everyday life. Russia and India are  good examples where the military makes extensive use of the latest technology but very little of it trickles down to the vast Russian or Indian population.

The same is true when you compare a small rural Iowa town with technology overflowing in every household to a small similar town on the same longitude in Puebla, Mexico, or continuing on the same latitude to the other side of the planet to Mysore in India or Astana in Kazakhstan.  Maybe 5% of the technology in a farm village that in Iowa is found in every home can be found in even a dozen homes in Puebla, Mysore or Astana. Widespread existence of modern commerce is the difference between an abundance of technology in every home and a technological desert.

Technology is a common element in the lives of people who live in the world of modern commerce.  But technology is only found in areas where modern commerce thrives. 

The two real benefits of modern commerce, the two greatest daily benefits are pervasive cooperation and an infinite array of livelihoods. 

 Pervasive Cooperation not competition.

For people whose eyes and minds are closed, modern commerce is a competitive system. For people whose eyes and minds are open, modern commerce is more than 95% cooperation every minute and every hour of the day. 

Yes, Boeing competes with Airbus, Peet’s competes with Starbucks and Taco Bell competes with McDonald’s.  But the same airline can buy both planes and a consumer can go to any coffee shop or any fast food outlet minutes apart.  That is the  strange idea of market competition from the consumer point of view.  Competition in the market means multiple businesses are clamoring to make you happy.  Acting as if they were potential lovers, going after you;  the word competition doesn’t make much sense. Lovers pursuing you, is more like it. Market competition is more accurately a love fest.

For people whose eyes are open we see employees working together, every minute of the day, supporting each other, having birthday and anniversary parties at work, being extra kind to customers and suppliers.  We see suppliers doing everything they can to help their customers with the best possible service, the latest technology, advice on best practices and useful trade information. Everywhere we look in modern commerce we see cooperation and mutual help. 

That is the incredible beauty of modern commerce.  There is no tribal rivalry.  It is the opposite of  many Chinese stores where you see fellow clan members treating family much better than other customers.  In Southeast Asia, you see Malaysians and Indonesian merchants being cold or rude to Chinese customers.  In tribal societies entire families work in the same business. In contrast, in a Los Angeles Peet’s coffee shop you’ll find a barista who is Shia Muslim, a Bahai, a Jew, a Baptist and three atheists working together effectively for years, on every shift. Helping each other. That is modern commerce versus all other economic systems.

An infinite array of livelihoods

One of the greatest benefits of modern commerce is most often overlooked.  One can find work in a very wide variety of livelihoods.  Before the turn of the 20th century, the variety of occupations was limited.  There were several types of farm workers, several types of day laborers, ministers, medical workers, lawyers, teachers and public officials.

As the government grew in the 20th century,  the need to classify occupations increased and the first Occupational Codes were published.  In 1938 the first classification of occupations  had 4 digits, for a possible 10,000 occupations with only a few hundred occupations listed.  By 1958 the list had 5 digits for a possible 100,000 occupations with less than 1,000 actual occupations individually itemized.  By the 1970s the Occupation Code list fell out of use in most of the United States, except for tax authorities,  because there were so many ambiguous multi-functional occupations and so many people who had broad occupational responsibilities that a simple occupational number was meaningless.

Today, people working for large corporations are hired with a specific occupational title but the responsibilities are diverse, complex and variable; especially where managerial responsibility is included.

A young person entering the job market has a nearly limitless choice of livelihoods and a mature worker can virtually define their own occupation.  This is a miracle of the modern commercial world. Almost limitless variety of available livelihoods,

Adam Smith, more than 250 years ago, championed the commercial marketplace where the miracle of individual greed was supreme as opposed to individual generosity.  Smith pointed out that the baker would not get up every day at 2 in the morning, for most of his life, to bake bread out of the kindness-of-his-heart, but he would out of personal income earning desires.

That was a very limited but persuasive argument for the open commercial market.  Today, with modern commerce ascendant in much of the world, we know that there are two more powerful arguments for the open market: a daily world where a wide variety of people can work cooperatively together and a world where a myriad, nearly infinite, number of skills and talents can be appreciated and rewarded.

Modern commerce has created a  miracle never seen before in human history.

Compatibility

I’ve found an element that is crucial to a couple's compatibility that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.  Physics.

The insight came when a close friend died and I asked my partner if she could have married him.  She asked me the same question about my friend’s wife.  We both answered ‘No’ and came to the same conclusion.  The reason for Our mutual compatibility was the same reason for our incompatibility with our married friends.

My friend and his wife are klutzes.  They can’t connect a TV set to the cable system, can’t assemble the simplest appliance or use their new cell phones.  

Some people are good at manipulating the physical world, hammering, sawing, attaching and detaching and others are not.  From our experience the reason for this effectiveness in dealing with the physical world has to do with their understanding of physics.

Humans develop a physical sense of the world.  What is hard, what is pliable and what is similar. That view shapes how people manipulate the world and how they direct workers around them to manipulate the world. 

I never recommended my best hired workers to my friend and his wife because they could not distinguish a hard job from an easy one and they would complain about the work done by a worker whether it was excellent or shoddy.  Neither of them could give good directions to get a job done, whether for a plumbing problem or putting a new lock on a door.

This view of the world seems to me to be a key element in sexual partnerships.  We know that smell, cleanliness, money views and countless other prominent issues are part of compatibility and are what counts when sexual attraction wears off.  I just want to add the physical view of the world to the list of compatibility issues. 

 Just a note for marriage counselors and people who counsel couples before marriage. Check on whether one or both are ‘handy’ with tools.

Good Summary

Victor Davis Hansen, one of my favorite thinkers and commentators, has written a beautiful summary of how wrong the current situation in America is for those of us who love this country and appreciate the contributions we have made to the world and to humanity.

Here!