R World

Tweeting into a New Year - Jan 2012

2012-02-02T08:43:00.000-08:00

I think that I may usea pen name for my next book. I'll call it, Dale Carnivore's Who Needs Friends:Self Help for Hard Times.

When I'm king, ratherthan have a leap day, we'll just have a floating "Mulligan Monday"that folks can use for do overs after bad days

"Sainthoodexpected for 2 Americans" http://yhoo.it/upZQo3 Those just seem like such terrible odds.

Notice that it's onlythe guys with really catchy and unique names who are serious contenders in GOPprimaries? Mitt. Newt. Ron.

Wonder how longSantorum's lead will last once Republicans realize that he is a good Catholicwho thinks it’s ok to ban contraceptives.

@codymckibb, a pioneer in redefining work and lifestyle, wrote adelightful review of my book, The Fourth Economy. ht.ly/1gwYyZ

1,000 tweets. 1,500blog posts. The idearrhea continues unabated. I probably owe an apology tosomeone for this.

1st biz idea for 2012:launch a website named huffandpuffingtonpost. We'll blow hot air about theissues of the day.

@trammel :) almost said we would do our bit to raiselevels of fear and paranoia but given it is a media outlet, that seemedredundant.

Just got a call tolower my interest rate. As if the rate of interest in a recorded telemarketingpitch could get any lower.

Biz idea: line of toyswith hidden magnets that you couple with strip around room. Flip switch andPooft! Toys instantly "picked up."

Those lunatics on soCal freeways who drive the speed limit. It's like they WANT to be rear ended.

Perry says Iranianswill "literally move at the speed of light into Iraq." Why did Obamalet them develop speed of light mobiles?

The new rule of socialmedia is that if it takes you longer than a single tweet to explain yourself,then you probably won't hold people's

One of the harderthings to know in life: when to persist, when to adapt, and when to abandon.

Alabama leads inpoints, but LSU is still ahead in arrests. [reference to national college football bowl]

Pretty excited. IfSantorum wins, I'll no longer be middle class! - The Atlantic http://bit.ly/Ao3n4C via @AddThis

Huntsman's share ofvote rose from 1% in Iowa to 17% in NH, which projects to 289% in SC. Finally,a candidate who can intimidate Putin.

T-shirt idea: Sorry.My funny t-shirt is at the cleaner's.

The GOP contest isgetting ugly. Newt just threatened to quit the race to spend more time withMitt's wife and family.

Sold out crowd at USDto hear @alfiekohn. Greatanticipatory buzz. Refreshments before his speech and then we change the worldafter.

RT #1: Some chick askedme what I would do with 10 million bucks. I told her I'd wonder where the restof my money went.

Product idea:low-rider pants. Blu light emanating from below the cuff. Hydraulics that liftthe hem up and down.

Among Eli Manning'smany annoying traits is his disregard for inevitability. Spoils Patriots perfectseason in '08 and Packers near-perfect season this year?

Huntsman, liberals'favorite candidate they'd never vote for, and candidate who tested best insimulations against Obama, is dropping out.

Play calls I'd like tosee: "Jones and Bigowski, you drop 10 yards then dance the Finale fromChorus Line."

@dmorey the original sports simulation must have beenthat electronic football game that vibrated the players to move them.

Tomorrow, Wikipediaprotests #SOPA by going dark. Or, as legislators call it, "fact-free"Wednesday.

Just say"Arrr!" to the Stop Online Piracy Act #SOPA.

He'd met reality once.Didn't much care for it.

Wonderfully accessibleand insightful conversation about finance :http://bit.ly/waUeLN (It's difficult to kill the gods)

Rick Perry dropped outwithout challenging anyone to a duel to avenge his loss? I thought he was mostlikely to Aaron Burr the primaries.

Best Twitter profilepicture goes to @Austan_Goolsbee

@PeteDominick Newt's Health Care Plan: full coverage untilexpensive diagnosis, when your coverage goes to a younger, prettier patient.

Investors sell offGOOG upon realization that Google's earnings potential is finite.

The only reason thereis a Republican front-runner is because there has to be.

Who knew that comingout in favor of open marriage was all it took to win in South Carolina?

http://bit.ly/yBIXWE 2011 - most jobs created in San Diego in adecade. Seems recessions and recoveries are initially ignored as anomalies.

Good news in SanFrancisco: the Giants will play in the Super Bowl! Bad news: Oh. Right. TheGiants is the name of our baseball team.

RT @hotdogladies Actually,elitism is beneath me.

Theory about why GOPlead keeps changing: primary voters hate experts and will vote out of their wayto confound pundit predictions.

So one billion+ peoplesuddenly convinced it is the start of a lucky year. What a fascinatingexperiment in risk taking.

First Crofts now Klum.Poor Seal - yet another traumatic breakup. [Warning - this tweet containsdecades old reference.]

Biz idea: apply clowncar technology to mass transit and moving companies.

Kind of hope Obama's #SOTU is just blooper reel from GOP debates.

It's always darkestbefore the yawn.

Seeing congress(median age of 85?) at #SOTU perhaps the reason there's no cooperation is because they (literally)cannot hear each other.

Wonder how many times president,whenexiting #SOTU hasaccidentally co-signed someone's mortgage.

"My pleasures arethe most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting." - Nabokov(quote courtesy of @brainpicker

Absolutely gorgeousdrive up the coast to Irvine today. Now sunny and 76.

"Orgasmic salad?That's disgusting."

"Um, that's organic."

"Oh. In that caseI'll just have the soup."

Facebook going publicraises privacy concerns .... (among headlines we'd like to see)

Laugh at Newt for hismoon colony idea, but at least he's got a backup plan: if he doesn't win thepresidency, he'll be space emperor.

Here's a project Ihelped a client to plan: treatment reduces patient injections by 330 per yr. http://bit.ly/y1tA0Y

Newt Gingrich:"Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?" Bob Dole:"Because it saves them time.

He was like a dogmawith a bone.

Iran has thecapability to maybe develop a bomb eventually? So this is now sufficientjustification for attack?

Rejected GOP campaignslogans: "You have to admit ... it's gonna be Mitt."

What Bread Tells us About Fiscal Policy

2012-01-31T08:12:00.000-08:00

It's true that baking bread involves mixing ingredients, letting them rise, and then baking them. It is not true that these steps can be done in any order. Pop the ingredients into the oven before you've mixed them, or before they have had a chance to rise, and your results will be very different. Timing and sequence matter.

The same is true of fiscal policy. It's true that a country would like to get to full employment and would like to run sustainable deficits. It's not true that a country can do this in any order.

Britain elected one of the smartest conservative politicians around, making David Cameron Prime Minister 20-some months ago. Cameron was savvy enough to realize that the outrageous deficits had to be reduced through a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts. He was intent on getting Britain's fiscal house in order and when he first took steps in that direction, the British rewarded him with a rise in poll numbers.

In the last quarter of 2011, though, Britain's GDP contracted. Cameron did the right thing at the wrong time.

Even here in the US, the big push to get our budgets in order is hurting us. GDP growth in 2011 was only 1.7 percent. One reason why is that government spending dropped by 2.1 percent. While the private sector was adding jobs, the public sector was laying off.

Timing seems to be perpetually ignored in the talk about budgets. Balancing budgets before getting to full employment - or at least reaching a strong rate of job creation - is akin to popping unmixed ingredients into the oven. Or, at the very least, baking before the dough has risen.

If this recovery is flat, it might just be because we've let bakers with a belief in instant yeast into the kitchen.

Social Invention & The Fourth Economy

2012-01-30T12:10:00.001-08:00

John Lennon says you should Hold On

2012-01-18T07:07:00.001-08:00

Bullish on Stocks

2012-01-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

More than once, when preparing for a trip to a colder region of the country, I hesitated before packing clothes warmer than what would be comfortable here in warmer San Diego. Even if I'd been there the week before, I struggled to imagine weather so different than what I was experiencing at the moment. It seems like our forecasts even for simple and obvious things tend to been rooted more in the status quo than in what is probable.

That said, it does seem as though economic forecasters are finally beginning to imagine a 2012 that is different from 2011. I've already forecast the creation of 2 to 3 million jobs and a drop in unemployment to 7.5% or less. But there's more worth forecasting.

The car and housing markets will rebound simply because so many have been deferring buying a new car and getting their own place. Household debt has been paid down considerably in the last few years and people seem poised to buy. The ripple effects of this will do much to drive economic growth, job creation, and a rise in stock prices.

The bubble in gold will finally burst. Gold has so little intrinsic value that it is a waste of investment money anyway. Money put into real estate can help to build houses. Money put into stocks can help to expand businesses, create jobs, and fund R&D. The money put into gold is just a waste, and the gold bubble is likely to burst as anticipation of the apocalypse fades into the realization that the economy - after a lost decade - can, in fact, still behave normally. Most of gold's gains in the last decade have been based purely on speculation and Glen Beck ads.

Now is also a sweet time for real estate investment. Monthly costs on properties are incredibly low, given that property prices are so depressed at the same time that interest rates are so low. Look for an "unexpected" rise in real estate prices as soon as late this year, early next (2013).

But I'm most optimistic about stocks. US stocks in particular.

P/E ratios are low and consumption is down. If people are paying only $10 for every $1 of earnings now, think what will happen as higher sales increase profits (GM and Ford, for instance, are now retooled to become profitable at much lower production volumes than before) at the same time that optimism drives P/E ratios up. A rise in profits of, say, 20% coupled with a rise in P/E from about 11 to, say, 15 could mean a rise in indices in the tens of percent.

Europe's economy may do better in 2012 (its companies in particular), but the Euro will probably still frighten investors. More money could move into American dollars and real estate (some) and stocks (mostly) seem like the best place to park money. That could add even more fuel to stock prices.

The stock market seems mostly reflective of bad news now. And it is certainly possible that things will continue to stagnate. But the upside seems to be mostly ignored. Trillions of dollars are still sloshing about the globe in search of returns. It's probably a good idea to be positioned in stocks before that money comes rushing into the stock market than after it comes in.

The Most Important Thing To Remember for 2012

2012-01-04T15:47:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite quotes is from Peter Drucker. "Most problems cannot be solved. And most problems are made irrelevant by success."

Drucker the management consultant was talking about companies tendency to put their best and brightest on solving problems rather than pursuing possibilities. I think that the idea applies more broadly.

You will always have problems. Always. If your focus is on "fixing" problems you'll inevitably feel frustrated. You won't. In addition, life is short. It is a waste of time to apply a scarce resource (your time) to unending problems.

Let go of your problems. Instead, try to grab hold of success. That's hard enough but at least it is a possible task.

Huntsman's Policy / Politics Dilemma

2012-01-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

Jon Huntsman is the only GOP candidate who simply stated that he believes that scientists probably better understand climate change and evolution well enough to be trusted on the topic. Last night, he got 1% of the vote at the Iowa caucus.
This, as much as anything, seems to capture what is wrong with Republican politics. The gap between what makes for smart policy and smart policy is wide and seemingly growing. Whether it is ignoring climate change or getting excited about starting a war with Iran, any candidate wanting to win over Republican voters seemingly has to thumb his nose at what makes sense in terms of policy.
Frightening.

Bachmann - From Guano to Goner

2012-01-04T10:24:00.000-08:00

Michele Bachmann's closing speech last night sounded to me like something you'd have heard from that poor woman on the street corner who everyone avoids making eye contact with. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing was that once her speech was done, the broadcast switched back to pundits who didn't seem the least perturbed by her tone or message.

Here, in its entirety (I don't know what a person would excerpt) is a piece from National Journal. What is missing is the strident, nearly hysterical tone of it. You judge whether these are the words of a woman who inspires confidence or just confusion.

In a speech before the doors closed at the Iowa caucuses, Rep. Michele Bachmann insisted on Tuesday night she won't allow President Obama to "implement socialism" in the United States.
Here's an excerpt from Bachmann's speech at Cedar Falls at the University of Northern Iowa, standing alongside her mother:
"Iowans are rejoicing tonight because of that opportunity to reclaim our republic. We will do that. Standing with me is the woman who gave me life right here in Black Hawk county 55 years ago, and as I think of her, and as I think of the sacrifices that she laid down and made in my own life, I think to myself that we don't stand here alone.
"We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of generations who have gone on before. Going back to the time of William Penn who came to this country to bring the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to the time of the pilgrims who came here also to share the gospel of Jesus Christ, who stated that they willingly laid down their lives-- literally as stepping stones-- so that the next generation would prosper and know religious liberty.
"Generation after generation has sacrificed for us, including our military, including our veterans. My father signed up to serve honorably in the United States Air Force here in Black Hawk county. It is for them, it is for their memory that we are here tonight because we are here to reclaim the greatness of this country.
"We are unwilling to allow Barack Obama to implement socialism in the United States of America. That will happen on our watch! We won't let it."

Michele Bachmann was forced to end her campaign today. At moments like this, I'm inclined to believe that American democracy can be trusted.

Last Tweets of 2011

2012-01-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

At times hedemonstrated a gift for numbers. One morning, for example, he multiplied allthe zeros in his cheerios at a glance.

To make numbers lessabstract, present federal budget numbers as "per household" andcalories as "hours to walk off."

Even after losing 5Mjobs his 1st year (worst since Great Depression), Obama's job loss total is ½Mless than Bush thru first 34 months.

Personal ad I'd liketo see - Dog needs driver: finally caught a car.

"Grouprink:" when a group of people all simultaneously thinks it is their phonethat's ringing.

Matt 6:32 has 1stemoticon? "... after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenlyFather knoweth that ye have need

Catapults seem like anoverlooked solution for short-distance commutes.

Technically theChargers are not yet eliminated from the playoffs. Just as technically I'm notyet eliminated from the GOP nomination.

RT @sacca Todaystarted well before yesterday.

S&P may downgradeEuro Zone - including Germany. This, the same ratings agency that assured ussubprime mortgages were safe.

Postal service couldmake billions by making service easier. Why not just bill like phone companies- end of month based on usage, letters and packages picked up at your door w/opostage?

Pujols offered $220Mby Marlins. Assuming same performance next 10 yrs as last, that's more thanhalf a million per HR or $100k per hit.

Wouldn't the mostpractical personalized ring simply be a voice saying,"Yes, Ron. This isYOUR phone ringing."

What if we're in a neweconomy? My "Simple Answer to Job Creation" Op-Ed is in thismorning's Union-Tribunehttp://bit.ly/vsh1cA

So today the EuropeanUnion decided to fine countries in financial trouble. Akin to making bankruptpeople loan money to themselves?

Got carded tonighttrying to buy Jr. Mints.

In the future, allwork will be automated but people will take games so seriously that they'll getdegrees in them.

Could have sworn Ijust saw kids openly celebrating Christmas. Now I'm beginning wonder if RickPerry has gotten anything else wrong.

Candidates onlypretend to strain against time limits on debate responses. Much easier todefend inane ideas for only 1 min.

His comedy soundedless like ad lib than ad libido.

Mitt asks Newt toreturn millions made lobbying. Newt asks Mitt to return millions madedestroying jobs. A new, very personal tax plan.

Have no idea how I'llever explain to my grandchildren why our generation paid so much attention toDonald Trump.

It's like a2-dimensional Rubik's cube - can't figure out how to make this secret Santaprogram work here in the home office.

The on-spot pollanalyst Nate Silver @fivethirtyeight says there are still FIVE plausible winnners innext month's Iowa caucus.

Iraq withdrawal after4,802 coalition casualties (4,484 US), 113,728 Iraqi civilian deaths, and$823.2 billion.

I suddenly don't carethat Ron Paul's economic plan was just like the one that inspired Dickens. Ilove this guy.

Political debateswould be infinitely more fascinating if your opponent got to choose onerebuttal before which you had to suck helium.

We will get betterpoliticians when we get better citizens.

What about turning theWhite House into national museum and moving president into "Green"House designed for latest in sustainability?

Speaking offascinating: Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was so fascinated by LSDthat he took it intravenously as he was dying.

Kim Jong-il wasapparently very. Ill that is.

RT @GarryShandling Iplayed college basketball at North Carolina. Ok, North Korea. But, I was astarter.

Does anyone have dataabout the turnover within "the top 1%" in income? Wonder if it'scloser to 10% or 90% who qualify just once due to one-time events like sellinga business.

It was so much calmeraround the house now that she'd sent her husband away to boarding office.

"Worrying ispraying for the things you don’t want."http://bit.ly/tbNGnu from @ThomasLBryner

Hope Obama saved 1wish for the economy. Bin Laden, Gaddafi & Kim Jong Il dead & no GOPcandidate can hold a lead for more than a month.

Vaclav Havel, "words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government .. words canprove mightier than 10 military divisions”

The more airtime forcountry music in a metropolitan area, the higher are suicide rates. http://bit.ly/sDcWqR Causation or correlation?

Doppler-ganger effect:growing sense of foreboding that an approaching person may be your double, asense that recedes after they pass.

Kim Jong Il once shota 38 for 18 holes of golf. And, presumably, substances like heroin andhallucinogenics. http://bit.ly/sj1ERr

I've decided to beginan aggressive campaign of revisionist personal history.

#NewYearsResolutionsReconsidered - become the Michael Jackson of Polka.

Virginia RepublicanParty just ensured "outsider" status to everyone but Romney and Paulby denying everyone else room on the ballot. http://reut.rs/uvWJvC

No. I don't miss theseasons.

Good to see that DrewBrees has finally recovered from the pain of being traded from the San DiegoChargers.(Oh, and congrats on breaking single season passing yardsrecord.)

British dogs watch TV50 minutes a day [per Harpers]. From this we can conclude that they'reobviously uninterested in plot resolution.

So excited about 2012.It includes a leap year, Olympics, an election & the end of MayanCivilization. And that's just what's scheduled.

RT @alanwebber "I never predict. I look out the windowand see what's visible but not yet seen." Peter Drucker

You read it herefirst: by end of 2012, unemployment will be under 7.5%. (Assumes 2.5+ millionjobs created, the avg from '60 to '99.)

File under political / social laws: it's easier to distortreality than change it.

Holiday dinners arelike amateur talk radio. Without screeners. Or predictable politicalorientation. Or the option to hang up.

The presidentialcabinet needs a jester whose job is to mock them about their limits and todangle before them the null hypothesis.

Relieved to know thatI still have a couple of days before I have to start procrastinating in myresolve to be a better person.

I'm accepting year enddonations for my new charity, "Dictators without Borders."

I'm doing "OldYear's Resolutions" this year. One day of radical transformation mightactually be plausible.

S&P 500 rose 8%,then dropped 19%, then rose 14% to finish 2011 EXACTLY where it started: 1257. ThatFamily Circus kid whose walks were punctuated with so many circuitous tangets hasbecome a day trader?

No need for lifeextension if we could work out technology for pausing time so that time didn'tadvance any faster than we actually used it.

I may have reached theage that I should begin making new year's resignations: things about myself towhich I simply resign myself for 2012.

Unemployment's Big Drop in 2012

2011-12-29T10:53:00.000-08:00

The double-nothings (the decade from 2000 to 2009) were the worst for job creation in half a century. From the 60s to the 90s, the economy created an average of about 2.5 million jobs per year. In the decade from 2000 to 2009, the economy actually lost an average of 100,000 jobs per year.

It seems to me that the central economic question is whether the last decade was an anomaly, an aberration for an economy still generally able to create jobs or ... if the last decade was a culmination in a downward spiral, further proof that our economy is sputtering on its way to stagnation.

If we just look at the raw numbers by decade, you can see that job creation was fairly stable until last decade.

Just looking at these numbers, it is easy to think that perhaps starting with 9-11, the US tumbled into a "lost decade" economically, hardly able to exceed the average of past decades in even its best decade. If that's the case, it is easy to believe that we'll have a return to norm, and that return will seem spectacular. Just an average year for past decades - creating 2 million or more new jobs - would be enough to lower unemployment by a point and change the mood of the country. And given aging baby boomers, this is is not an unreasonable forecast.

But these numbers are not adjusted for the fact that we have a larger labor force than ever. In the 1960s, we had half as many people working (or looking for work) as we do now. Scaling the above numbers to adjust for this (assuming that 1.7 million jobs in the 60s is equivalent to 3.4 million in today's economy, for instance), gives the graph a different shape.

This graph shows a downward slide, a steady worsening in our ability to create jobs. The narrative here would include factors such as the rise of emerging economies like China and India becoming more competitive with our own and making it more difficult for us to create jobs where labor makes (relatively) so much more. This story and graph suggest that until we hit some floor that puts us on par with other countries, we'll continue to struggle. Job creation won't keep up with growth in the labor force and unemployment will steadily rise. You probably have your own narrative to explain this.

Personally, I think that we're facing some hybrid of these two stories, but tend to favor the first story more. That is, I think that we'll continue to feel downward pressure on wages but I do think that the last decade was an anomaly in terms of job creation; I suspect that by the end of 2012, unemployment will be under 7.5% and during the next year we'll create 2 to 3 million new jobs. In other words, we'll create as many jobs next year as we did - on average - in past decades. And given what a terrible decade the double-nothings were, this "average" will seem spectacular.

Voting for Social Safety Net of Your Choice

2011-12-29T09:51:00.000-08:00

Curiously, a great deal of our political differences can be captured by our aversion to risk. The thought that we should have universal health care is - at least in part - a question of how much risk we're willing to assume. If you get sick when you have no coverage, this could bankrupt you: in such a scenario, a temporary job loss could wipe out your assets.

Part of the question of how big a social safety net we should have is a function of empathy: do you want widows without children or anyone without work to have something other than bridges to sleep under. But part of it, too, is a function of our own optimism or uncertainty about our future: will we need unemployment insurance that lasts longer than 6 months at some point in the future, or food stamps for our kids in the event that our careers get de-railed by some massive restructuring of industries or technology makes a hard-earned skill obsolete. Do you want to live in a world without a safety net or support?

It would be fascinating to try creating a community that gave people the opportunity to choose which level of taxes and support they wanted. And then lock this in. (Say that you can choose temporarily at 18 and then have to choose permanently at 30.)

The community as a whole would pay for things like basic research, FDA, and defense, the benefits of which would not be experienced individually. After that, the options might look like this:
Pay 11% tax and have to pay for roads, education, medical, unemployment, and retirement.
Pay 22% tax and education, roads, and medical is now included.
Pay 33% and add to the above unemployment and retirement.

It would be curious to see polls of people asked what level of taxes and safety net they'd want if they knew they could not reverse it and could - in the extreme - end up homeless should things go poorly. If you knew that you could become "one of those people," would you be more likely to create a safety net for them?

One Nation .... Gone to Many

2011-12-23T10:28:00.000-08:00

"One nation" was probably always more fiction than fact but perhaps one of the unintended outcomes of how the Internet allows many to many communication is that the "many nations" that compromise this country has never before been so clear. It is not just in the much reported polarization. The likelihood of Americans coming into work in the morning having watched the same news report, the same sitcom, read the same book, heard the same radio ... the likelihood of a shared reference has perhaps never been lower. We're not entering caves; instead, we're all seeming to move from under the bell curve to increasingly remote regions of the long tail.

As our diversity becomes more clear, I wonder what that will mean to our still relatively novel concept of nation-state. The recently departed Christopher Hitchens pointed out that it was only after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address that the term shifted from "the United States are" to "the United States is." About the same time that our own civil war settled the question of whether the united or the states portion of our country was more important, Germany and Italy were becoming nation-states. In the grand sweep of history, the idea of a nation-state is still relatively new.

Both the concept of nation and the reality of state are "made up, are social inventions. My bet is that it is the state half of this equation that is most likely to change first, though. And it'll be fascinating to see what new inventions come from that.

Kahneman Explains Our Love of Irrelevant Issues

2011-12-22T13:58:00.000-08:00

One of the great mysteries of life is how we manage to waste somuch time in political debate, dialogue, and coverage on issues that are – at best– of marginal importance. I think I finally found the answer to why in DanielKahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

One concept Kahneman shares has to do with our tendency tosubstitute easy questions for hard ones. For me, this explains why so much airtime in politics is taken up with questions of little consequence.

Kahnemangives an example of an analyst who bought stock in Ford. Asked why, the analystreplied that he'd just been to a car show and left convinced that Ford"sure can make great cars." As Kahneman points out, the real questionwhen buying stock is whether or not the stock is undervalued. But the analystsubstituted that difficult question for the simpler question of whether Fordwas making good cars. All of us, when faced with a difficult question, tend to substitutea simpler - albeit irrelevant - one.

It seems to me that the big question in politics should be, How dowe improve quality of life for more people? That’s a big question and answeringit is one that isn’t easy. No one can feel confident about their ability toanswer it.

By contrast, the little and largely irrelevant questions – silly questionsbest characterized by whether or not we should be able to burn the flag – are onesfor which we have clear answers as long as we have strong opinions. Answeringthese questions leave us feeling confident in our own judgment. Answering thebig questions, by contrast, makes us feel uncertain. For most of us, we preferfeeling confident to feeling inadequate. The result? We choose questionsbecause of how they make us feel rather than what their answers will do toimprove the world.

And that’s a pity. Just think what we could do withall the attention paid to politics if it were focused on real, albeit difficult,questions.

Newt Wit

2011-12-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

The narrative on Newton Elroy Gingrich is that the man - for all his flaws - is very intelligent. More important than whether you believe that is the fact that Newt so obviously does. He trusts his own intelligence so much and the intelligence of others so little that he envisions a world where he is more dictator than president. This alone is enough to fear the consequence of his supposed intelligence. Worse, what he says suggests that he is not really that smart.

Could anything more clearly demonstrate how muddled his thinking than his stance on the judiciary and Federal Reserve? Sadly, pointing out the flaws in Newt's thinking requires explanations of longer than 2 minutes, which probably ensures his safety from any scrutiny in this age of media sponsored attention deficit disorder. But if you have five minutes ....

Let's start with the economy and what that implies for the Federal Reserve. There are only two ways that the government can influence the economy: through monetary or fiscal policy.

Monetary policy has to do with setting interest rates, growing or contracting the money supply, and changing banking regulations so as to make it easier or harder to get credit. Get this wrong and you can trigger a recession or inflation. The Fed is in charge of monetary policy.

Fiscal policy has to do with taxes and spending. Congress and the president are in charge of this and change it with their budgets and tax laws.

As it now works, the Federal Reserve Chairman (Bernanke now, Greenspan before) is in charge of monetary policy. He does not have to mediate negotiations between Republicans and Democrats or face the risk of presidential veto. He simply adjusts monetary policy based on his professional judgment about what is best for the economy. Politics does not enter into it.This makes his ability to respond to economic issues relatively easy and quick.

By contrast, fiscal policy has almost everything to do with politics and nearly nothing to do with economics. Chronic deficits are more product of Congress's political judgment than their economic judgment and any changes in tax rates or budgets result from prolonged and difficult negotiations between two very different parties.

So, what is Newt's solution to the "problem" of the Fed's independence from politics? He would fire the Fed Chairman. The impact of this, of course, is that it would make Fed Chairmen - and thus monetary policy - as politically driven as fiscal policy is now. The impact of that? Well imagine a world in which both tools of economic influence were subject to political ideologies and perceptions with little regard for economic realities. Imagine, that is, the Federal Reserve as ineffective as Congress.

Newt also wants to fire judges who disagree with him, even close entire courts that make rulings that he finds offensive. Not only is this an egregious attack on the separation of powers, it again suggests that even rulings on the interpretation of law would be subject to the political nonsense that has resulted in a single-digit approval rating for Congress.

Newt's reasoning skills are flawed and his mind continually distracted from considering consequences with the allure of shiny new thoughts. How anyone can conclude that "at least Newt's smart" escapes me.

In last night's debate, in defense of his inane idea to close courts with which he disagreed, Newt said that Thomas Jefferson did something similar. The proper response to that is, "I've read Jefferson. You, Newton Elroy, are no Thomas Jefferson."

November '11 Tweets

2011-12-08T20:38:00.001-08:00

As part oftrend towards ever-younger billionaires, I predict some 9 yr old will launch anew market that lets kids trade excess candy.

7 billionpeople. Now is it time to colonize space?

First I'venoticed that the word "harm" is smack in the middle of pharmacy.

Unlikepaintings, music, books & films, vid games R co-created by audience. 1stgen of gamers not likely to accept the way things R. #OWS

It tookcenturies before we coupled luggage and wheels into one product. Anothercentury before we put wings on luggage and packages?

"Youngmen sleep with their dreams and old men sleep with their conscience. " -John Prine

Why couldn'twe tax each hour of the week by 20-some seconds in order to save up for anextra hour every weekend?

Biz idea forgroup with heavily discounted rates on travel - quadruple A.

Now thatMichael Jackson's doctor was found guilty, we need to find someone to holdresponsible for Elvis's death.

The ratio oflove songs to songs about teleconferences seems wildly disproportionate toactual experience.

You have twochoices: make a choice or don't make a choice. Wait. Maybe that means you haveno choice. About having to choose, I mean.

Always aninteresting day when the weather forecast includes mention of an asteroid. http://bit.ly/vD67Ix

My latest bizidea: not dot.com or dot.om but dot.amish The webiste domain for folks withoutelectricity.

RT @sacca:Dance like no one's watching. Sing like no one's listening. Tweet like no algorithmis coldly deciding your social worth.

Have toappreciate the obvious thought Rick Perry put into considering consequences ofeliminating the dept. of .... uh ... um ...

11/11/11 =tres once, which is much bigger than dos xx's. Forget about cosmic consciousness- stay alert for drunk drivers.

11-11-11. Oras the turkeys refer to it, "the last days."

Who had theauthority to give out the first PhD? They obviously didn't have one.

Call of Dutysold $400 million in 1st 24 hrs. Key to its success is getting to compete w/ Russianswho have only dial-up.http://n.pr/tiLHTE

Time to modifyWarhol's prediction "everyone will be famous for 15 mins" to,"in the GOP, everyone will be a front-runner for 15 mins."

Focus oncompetition, grades, ranking, and status are all substitutes for a focus onmeaningful personal goals

If onlyBloomberg could have ended occupy Iraq as quickly as he ended occupy Wall St. #OWS.

"companiestoday are 3X more likely to get to $250K in revenue during an 18 month periodthan they were 6 years ago"http://bit.ly/vvsOCW

Curiously, itdid not seem as though all the human beings were being human.

New Muppetmovie is PG. Not for content. Because theater owners terrified at thought of mobs of unsupervised 6 yr old puppet groupies.

Neutrinostravel faster than light. You know what that means? Once I build myneutrino-mobile I can time travel.http://bit.ly/tw3TQp

He thought acountry falls into a recession whenever a generation whose favorite subject wasrecess grows up to run the economy.

Cashier at grocerystore asked me, "Is that to go?"

So old that Ican remember when you could read the entire World Wide Web on a long weekend.

"TVSurvey" call just came in. Tired of being ignored, I hollered, "Moresex! More violence!" Glad to finally be making a difference.

Deficit a hugenon-issue. W/ unemployment at 9%, it's dumb to raise taxes or cut spending now& Congress can't commit future Congresses.

Instead ofLonghorns my university mascot will be Unicorns. Like an army of one -Autodidact U.

Did theyreally think they could distract us from the fact that we still don't havepersonal robots or flying cars with four-blade razors?

Eventually itdawned on me that the flashing red light was not going to change.

Seen: I dreamof a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motivesquestioned.

Ah,Thanksgiving - the one day during the year when Americans eat to excess.

Can't reallywork out the Macy's Day Parade. It's a series of ads for float sponsors ... andstill they break for commercials?

Rolled out ofbed (a term redefined post-feasting) so thankful that we don't have to be sothankful today.

Fascinatinghow whether the market falls or rises, they're able to provide a perfectlyplausible reason.

Has anyonecalculated how much in the way of jobs and GDP California - w/ its music,movies, and software industries - has lost to piracy?

Tom was in avery heavy metal band. He played percussion. Jack hammer, to be specific.

Just boughtGreek yogurt, doing my bit to help out that poor country. Social activist withactive culture.

Saw shockinglylarge numbers at ice cream shop last night. They must have been sufferingpost-Thanksgiving weekend caloric withdrawals.

In a fewgenerations kids will sing nursery rhymes w/ nonsensical terms like "cyberMonday" "black Friday" and "terabyte Tuesday."

And what ifpeople simply grew tired of the recession and began acting normal? Consumerconfidence up 15 ptshttp://reut.rs/unuf79

Product ideato help with job-related stress: little wine boxes about the size of juiceboxes for lunch or break.

Record levelsof wealth disparity might just be a natural consequence of record levels ofmarket volatility.

Sure You Have What it Takes to Win. Who Doesn't? The Real Question is, Do You Have What It Takes to Fail?

2011-12-07T22:02:00.001-08:00

The older I get, the more convinced I am that we don't do enough to celebrate failure. Progress depends on it.

In January, one team will win the Super Bowl. The only reason they get to do that is because 31 other teams did not. In sports, nobody wins without someone losing. You can't hope for a win without simultaneously hoping for a loss. Loss is not due to lackluster effort, unimaginative creative visualization, or bad karma. Loss in sports is designed into the outcomes. Just like wins.

But sports is just made up. We don't have to have failure in the real world, you might say. We can, for instance, design an educational system in which everyone wins. Perhaps. But failure is still an essential part of life and is as vital to progress in the real world as it is to champions in the artificial world of sports.

Think about it. If history is any guide, sometime in the next year some people will start a new company destined for greatness - a company that will, in its prime, remind us of GM, IBM, or Google in theirs. But even more companies will flag somewhere between inception and this grand goal, will get buried in the landfill of failed expectations. Lots and lots of variables go into winners and losers and no one can be exactly sure which will make the next generation of winners win and which will make them lose.

If a community wants to be home to the next big company, it has to fund lots and lots of companies you'll never hear of. Uncertainty alone means that winners require lots of losers.

The same is true in the competition for the next generation of theories to explain psychology, cosmology, disease and everything else. Again, given that everyone has a shot at defining the next big theory, lots and lots of theories will have to be expounded in order for the few that move us forward to emerge. A million books will be published this year - yet only a tiny number will sell more than a million copies. And the list of such ensured failures goes on.

By definition, the vast majority of attempts to change the status quo will fail.

Yet the advance of history depends on these winners which - in turn - depend on these failures. To avoid failure is to avoid winning. Any community that doesn't teach its people that failure is inevitable, noble, and essential to progress risks having too few big wins.

And in the end, I wonder if failure or winning isn't somehow more random than we'd ever care to admit. Given this, perhaps it is worth remembering that you do what you do because of who you are, not because you really expect to "win." And maybe an increase in the portion of people doing this is the definition of progress.

The Theology of Emoticons

2011-12-06T19:50:00.001-08:00

In the near future, theologians reading the King James version noticed what they concluded was the first use of emoticons. In Matt 6:

³²(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

Once they'd found the smiley face in the middle of the verse, theological debate ensued.

"What does this mean?"
"I think it is accidental."
"Do you explain away any inconvenient thing in the Bible this way?"
"How?"
"As an accident?"
"No."
"Why don't we just assume that this is the word of God and as such there are no accidents?"
"Well this is hardly the stuff of a Dan Brown novel."
"Let's not degrade this conversation with reference to fiction."
"So you suppose that this is serious?"
"Let's assume that it is. So what do we make of this?"
"Well, let's look at the context. It's the sermon on the Mount and Jesus is telling people not to worry about natural provision because God will care for them."
"So the smiley face is a happy, reassuring sign that lets people know that these temporal things are not so important. God will provide."
"Perhaps. But that wouldn't do much to explain the many people for whom God apparently did not provide - the untimely deaths, the starvation, the disease. It could be that this smiley face is the first instance of sarcasm."
"Please, Jesus was sarcastic?"
"Well, it would explain so much."
"Jesus is love. The smiley face is obviously an expression of joy."
"Ha! Sarcasm."
"Joy!"

And just like that, the discovery of the first emoticon created a new rift, a new schism in the Christian world. After the discovery of this first emoticon, the Christian world was still divided into Catholic and Protestant but each of those was further divided into sarcastic and hopeful. And perhaps it was the toll of thousands of years of observing human nature, the times, or an actual insight into reality but the new believers in God the Sarcastic were surprisingly numerous. It was - and remained - a curious world.

Bad, Sure, But Still Better Than Bush. And He Got Re-elected

2011-12-02T16:58:00.001-08:00

This latest jobs report makes Obama’s re-election more probable.

In Obama’s first year, he presided over the worst loss in jobssince the Great Depression, more than 5 million jobs gone. In spite of that, hecompares pretty well against Bush at the same point in his presidency – 34 monthsin.

In spite of his miserable start, Obama actually comparesfavorably with Bush.34 months in Bush had “lost” 2.3 million jobs whereas Obamahas “lost” 1.8 million. (And yes I agree that causes of job loss go back muchfurther than the prior month and that president’s don’t “create” jobs. I alsobelieve that there is no single variableas important to this statistic as presidential policies.)

You might argue that Obama has, of course, spent a terriblesum to improve on Bush’s bad record. And it is true that Obama had presidedover the biggest deficit ever. But ifyou look at the rate by which he increased it, it isn’t that different fromwhat happened under Bush.

By the end of his third year, Bush had swung the deficitnegative by over $600 billion. By contrast, Obama has swung it negative by $800billion. That is worse. And the total is huge. But still, it is plausible thatthe story will be quite different for Obama by the end of his first term, incomparison to Bush.

Comparing annual deficits in the fourth year of their termwith the deficit in the final year of the prior administration makes Obama lookgood by contrast.

Bush had increased the annual deficit by $650 billion.Current projections suggest that Obama will have increased it by $300 to 400billion. It is not that Bush did better than Obama – he just had the goodjudgment to make things worse from a far better starting point.

This should be good news for Obama’s re-election prospects.If Bush could beat the Democrats – Kerry in particular – after a first termthat included job losses, a huge increase in deficits and the terrible tragedyof 9-11, perhaps Obama’s shot at beating a weak GOP field – Romney inparticular – after a first year that included job losses, a huge swing indeficits and the assassination of Osama seems reasonable.

[Find the numbers from 1939 to 2011 here.]

Obviously The Superrich Need to Spend More

2011-12-01T11:17:00.001-08:00

Here's an intriguing editorial by Nick Hanauer about why we should tax the rich more and poor less.

It reminds the reader that most of the debate about tax rates is more about moral judgment than economic policy.

There are cliched narratives that seem to color most discussions about tax rates.

Democrats argue that the rich are greedy crooks who raise spoiled children and the poor all had unfortunate childhoods and might still have recovered to become something if only they hadn't run into the fore-mentioned greedy crooks. Obviously, Democrats say, the rich should be taxed more and the poor should not be taxed at all - should in fact be given money from the rich.

And the Republicans, of course, argue that the poor made themselves that way by smoking crack and having babies out of wedlock and sleeping in the back of class and not brushing their teeth regularly. Meanwhile, the rich are all that way because they work harder, have saved more, and are generally someone you'd want to sit beside at jury duty. For this reason, Republicans argue, it just seems wrong to penalize the hard working rich folks in order to give their money to people who'll blow it all on beer and bingo.

Instead of focusing on judging the poor or rich, Hanauer focuses on a really practical matter. Rich don't spend money at the same rate that they earn it. If a community wants to grow the economy, it has to grow spending and a poor person will spend a greater portion of an additional $1,000 than will a rich person. (A fact born out by studies of marginal consumption.)
As Hanauer puts it,

"there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally."

So, unless you think that economic growth itself is immoral, the practical thing is to shift some money from those who save it to those who spend it.

Trend Spotter as Sport

2011-12-01T10:26:00.001-08:00

The Atlantic has a fascinating article: South Korea's Hottest IPO: Boy Band, Inc.

In essence, a Korean record and entertainment company went public last week, and now has a market cap of over $300 million. Such things allow people to invest in a company, but what if you could invest in a band?

Imagine a site where you could "bet on" or invest in bands or artists. This could be just an online game site, essentially, but one that let people predict band popularity.

I think for lots of folks, the ability to quantify or show their ability to be a taste maker or trend spotter would be worth it. And there would be two ways to show how cool you were. The obvious way would be to have a high-value portfolio that showed your ability to spot the hot acts before they were hot. The less obvious way is to have a stagnant value for your portofolio, to show that you are a contrarian, uninterested in what's popular.

For the bands, it might be a vehicle for promoting new acts, letting them prove to clubs and promoters that they are indeed rising stars.

Or this could be just a silly idea - like investing in boy bands.

Edison's Most Important Invention, or Time to Sponsor Social Invention

2011-11-29T08:41:00.001-08:00

It's hard to choose which of Edison's inventions was most impressive. He had 1,093 US patents for products as varied as the light bulb (which became a symbol of innovation), phonograph, radio, and even something akin to a motion picture projector.

I think that his biggest invention, though, was something completely different. As it turns out, Edison did not "invent" all these things. His really big invention was the first industrial Research & Development lab. Edison did not share credit with his employees and lived in a time when people were more ready to attribute inventions to a single genius than a group of cooperative scientists and engineers. What we think of as Edison's inventions were sometimes his own and sometimes his employees.

The R&D lab was a social invention that allowed a plethora of technological inventions. And Edison's lab became a model for in-house R&D labs that sprung up within modern corporations and universities that were themselves social inventions. With the R&D lab, we institutionalized technological innovation.

Technologicalinvention is a novel design that allows parts to do jointly what they could notdo on their own.

A socialinvention is a novel design that allows people to do jointly what they couldnot do on their own.

Both social (banks and stock markets) and technological inventions (steam engines and trains) have the potential to enable.

Edison's lab was not the first social invention that spawned so many technological inventions, though. In 1623, England passed a law that granted monopoly powers to technological inventors, what we now call patent law. Within a century, in 1699, the steam engine had been invented and the industrial revolution began.

The result of the industrial revolution? The first per capita increase in income in about 6,000 years. Social invention is as important to progress as technological invention.

Edison's lab marked a huge shift, from merely encouraging invention (with patent law) to actually sponsoring invention (with R&D labs that made invention normal work).

In the West, we no longer violently resist social invention, as we did with the invention of new forms of church and government during the Protestant Revolution and democratic revolutions. We encourage social invention in the business world, encourage and reward entrepreneurs. What we don't do, though, is sponsor it. That is, in terms of social invention we are closer to the conditions for technological invention prior to Edison's R&D lab.

Given how much social invention can change and improve lives, perhaps it is time that we moved from merely tolerating or encouraging it to actually sponsoring it. And maybe the big social invention that could help with this is getting serious about turning our corporations into business incubators and changing the role of employee to something more akin to entrepreneur.

And yes, this is one of the big ideas behind The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization.

Suddenly

2011-11-27T15:05:00.001-08:00

Suddenly, everyone realized that they had all the stuff they needed and had heard all the stories before.

But after a couple of weeks, bored and unsure what else to do, they one by one turned their TVs back on and returned to the malls.

No Super Heroes on this Super Committee

2011-11-21T20:16:00.001-08:00

There are only two questions Congress should consider: how do we create jobs and how do we raise living standards.

It is absurd to take on the question of how to reduce the deficit. With unemployment at 9%, it's stupid to raise taxes or cut spending. And given that unemployment is unlikely to drop to 6 to 8% before this Congress has finished its term, they can't make any progress towards deficit reduction anyway. Today's Congress cannot commitment a future Congress (if they could, the pre-Civil War Congress could have committed all future legislatures to uphold slavery).

Deficit reduction is a problem for tomorrow's Congress to solve. Job creation and GDP growth is a problem for today's Congress to solve.

The Super Committee failed to reach an agreement that would solve the deficit. So what. It would have all been promises that only future Congresses could have kept - and you can guarantee that those future Congresses won't be coming to Washington just to implement someone else's plan.

That deficit reduction during a recession has become such a huge issue is reminiscent of the push to invade Iraq. Austerity economics during a recession is an inane idea and yet we've somehow found ourselves unable to talk about anything but.

Business or Politics - Which Makes the Biggest Difference?

2011-11-20T08:29:00.001-08:00

Want to know one reason that daily papers face diminished readership? They focus on what the average person knows to be issues of diminishing returns.

Imagine someone making $40,000 a year.

In one scenario, they get a new president who lowers their taxes by 2 percentage points.

In another scenario, they get a new CEO who raises their salary by 2%.

The impact on after-tax income in the first scenario is about $100. The impact in the second is nearly $700.

And this does not even delve into the myriad policies changes having to do with issues like leave time, opportunity for advancement, equity sharing, and the ability to influence the (positive or negative) impact on the community.

Throughout the West, changes in management and policy at the level of employer will make a bigger difference than changes at the government level. And this belief about the diminishing returns to a focus on government policy vs. the advances that could accrue from a focus on corporate policy is one of the reasons that I wrote The Fourth Economy.

Heisenberg's Political Uncertainty Principle

2011-11-18T21:05:00.001-08:00

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle adapted to politics:
You can make sense to people or you can make sense of the world. The more that you capture and explain the complexity of reality, the less you make sense to the electorate; the more that you make sense to the electorate, the less accurately you explain reality.
Thus, the tension between successful policy and successful politics.

Bachmann's Brilliant Idea on Iraqi Reparations

2011-11-16T22:35:00.001-08:00

The GOP gaffes come so quickly that something that may have garnered attention in a normal year gets completely overlooked. For instance, in last Saturday's debate the sometimes lucid, sometimes inane Michele Bachmann indignantly demanded that Iraq compensate us for the expenses we incurred invading and occupying Iraq.

To put this in perspective, Iraq's annual GDP has risen to about $80 billion, still about $20 billion short of what we spend each year in the Iraqi occupation. So she not only thinks they should pay us back for all the bombs we dropped on them but she thinks that they could?

Not just a terrible idea but an untenable one. And perhaps that should be the motto of so many of these GOP candidates: our ideas shouldn't threaten you because there is no way they will even work.

Arthur Rubinstein on Life After Attempted Suicide

2011-11-15T17:14:00.001-08:00

Sounds similar to the wonderful Buckminster Fuller.
And then I find this wonderful quote:
"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." -Camus
(Thanks @vanillabean45 )

Jimmy Kimmel Takes Candy from Babies. And that's hilarious. Seriously. So stop your crying.

2011-11-14T17:28:00.001-08:00

10 million hits for Jimmy Kimmel's video in which little kids were told by their parents that they'd eaten all their candy. Hilarious. I can hardly wait for the one next week in which people are told that their spouse has cheated on them. And then people at the doctor are told that they have cancer. Could be a whole series. Should be a riot.

Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, & Muhammad Never Wrote a Word

2011-11-14T16:55:00.001-08:00

Bernard had been drinking. His eyes were watery and his grin sloppy. Hewas preparing for Thanksgiving with family. I was his designated driver. Whenhe is drunk, Bernard seems to be in one of two states - giddy or quiet. He'dbeen quiet long enough that I thought I'd risk his becoming giddy by asking aquestion. As it turns out, no topic is sober enough to counter a drunkenBernard.

"Have younoticed one thing that Socrates, the Buddha, and Jesus have in common?" Iasked.
Bernard began tochortle. "No! But I do know what John the Baptist and Winnie the Pooh havein common," and then he dissolved into laughter.
"What," Igroaned.
"Same middlename!" he doubled up in laughter, nearly hitting his head on the table.
I was trying tofeign tolerance but in fact I had to laugh. "No," I shook my head."Although I guess this is true of Winnie and John as well. Have you evernoticed that Socrates, Buddha and Jesus never wrote anything?"
"No,"Bernard confessed.
"At least, asfar as we know. They just wandered around and taught people. And yet look athow long their teachings have lasted," I said. "Look at how muchimpact they have had on people's thinking for thousands of years."
“Same with Muhammed,” he called out from the backseat.
“What?”
“Muhammed didn’t write anything down,” Bernard said. “Add him to your list ofgreat, unpublished teachers.”
“Wow,” I nodded. “Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammed.”

"Oh,Ron," Bernard giggled, "did you hear about Buddha's lost teachings?"
"No," Ireplied.
"Everyoneknows that the Buddha taught that want is at the root of unhappiness," andBernard began to giggle some more. "Did you know what he taught is at theroot of happiness?"
"No," Irepeated.
"Wanton!"And Bernard giggled at his wit. "Want makes you unhappy, and wanton makesyou happy! Get it?" And again he laughed. Bernard is, to his credit, acheery drunk.

"That's very witty for a man who slurs his words,Bernard. But seriously, doesn't this call into question the whole model ofwriting as a way to change people's thinking. I mean, doesn't this seem to youlike some kind of indictment of writing?"
"Maybe,"Bernard bobbed his head while wrinkling up his bottom lip. "Or maybe itjust proves that you can't focus on getting published and changing the world atthe same time." And again he laughed.

Then Bernard sounded very sober. “Well think of this. Three majorreligions – Jews, Christians, and Muslims – call Abraham their father and yethe didn’t write a thing.”
“Abraham is another I didn’t think of.”
“And think of this,” Bernard said. “All three groups have given birth toreligious people who are considered ‘people of the book.’ That is, people whodefine a great deal of their religion by reading scripture. And yet given noneof it would have been written in Abraham’s time, he couldn’t have defined hisreligion that way. Maybe all three religions have killed religion by putting itinto books.” And then he giggled, throwing what I thought was a good insightinto doubt.

"Iguess," I said, actually considering the possibility that he was seriousin spite of his giddiness.
"Or it mightjust prove that if you write things down you make your message harder forfuture generations to co-opt and call their own. Precision makes popularityless probable," he said with amazing precision for one so bleary eyed."If you want to be happy, be wanton with your words Wonald," helaughed again. "And if you want to have an impact, don't write anythingdown. Leave other people creative freedom to change your words so that lots ofpeople take ownership of them."

"Toolate," I said shaking my head. "I've written hundreds of blogpostings."
"Ha!"Bernard snorted. "You call that writing?." And then Bernard tiltedhis head back and laughed loudly.

(revised and updated from Nov 2009)

Name Confusion

2011-11-10T14:36:00.001-08:00

An old friend was born in Norway and is named Sveinung – buthe goes by Sven. He shared this the other day:

So I says, “Hello Marvin, I’m Sven.”

Marvin says, “Swen?”

Me, "Sven."

“Oh, Vance?” questions Marvin.

“No. It’s Sven,” I say.

Marvin shakes his head and mutters, “Tell my wife, bad ear …”
His wife says, “I’m Judy.

I say “I’m Sven.”

Judy says, “Hi Stan,” and mutters, "that wasn't so hard"

Markets and Irrigation

2011-11-10T10:43:00.001-08:00

It's worth knowing where the rain falls and rivers run. But that needn't be the final word on the distribution of water. Irrigation was one of the first inventions to allow what we know as modern civilization.

Markets distribute profits and income. That's good to know, but it needn't be the final word on its distribution. Distribution of income may, in fact, be one of the things that first made civilization civilized.

The Simple, but Sweeping, Answer to the Question of How to Create More Jobs

2011-11-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

We can continue to try repairing the old economy or we cancreate a new one.

Financial crises, stagnant wages, persistently highunemployment, protests, and growing government deficits coinciding with a lossof government jobs are all legitimate problems in their own right, but they aremore likely symptoms of something deeper. We’re living into one of the fourbiggest economic transitions since the Dark Ages.

Since about 1300 CE. a pattern of social invention andrevolution has created three economies: an agricultural, an industrial, and an information economy. And thatpattern is now repeating to create a fourth, entrepreneurial economy.

These changes we’re experiencing are different from normalbusiness cycles. This is bigger.

The last shift in the West – beginning around 1900 - tookus from an economy led by advances in capital to one led by advances inknowledge work, a transition from an industrial to an information economy.

Progress from about 1700 to 1900 came from dramaticincreases in capital: steam engines, factories, stock and bond markets, andbanks were invented or recreated and the communities that increased capital themost advanced the most.

Progress from about 1900 to the present followed from therise of knowledge workers: inventions like the modern university andcorporation, and radical advances in information technology helped to create aninformation economy in which companies making virtual products often becamemore valuable than those making “real stuff.” Communities that ignored thequestion of how to create more knowledge workers and make them more productive,and just focused instead on capital, were left behind. When the limit shifts somust the focus.

The emergence of each new economy has forced a revolutionin the dominant institution. This is no small thing. The power of elites overthe institution is dispersed outwards. People once used as tools by theinstitution begin to use the institution, instead, as a tool. “We are allpriests!” Martin Luther declared, overturning the notion that religion wassomething to be defined by the pope. The first economy, from about 1300 to1700, was catalyst to the Protestant Revolution. The second economy, from about1700 to 1900, brought us democratic revolutions. The third economy, from about1900 to 2000, democratized finance as knowledge workers’ pension funds and401(k) funds came to define investment markets.

This new fourth economy will likely transform thecorporation – today’s dominant institution - in similar ways. Most obviously,the role of the employee will become more like that of an entrepreneur.

Thesimple, but sweeping, answer to the question of how to create more jobs is thatwe need to become more entrepreneurial. The question of how we become moreentrepreneurial will first be answered within the corporation.

Depending on how one measures it, corporations make upbetween one third to two thirds of the 100 largest economies in the world, yet veryfew of them encourage entrepreneurship.

Developed countries are considered lands of opportunitieswhere people can expect to make more than heads of state. (About 6 millionAmericans make more than Obama.) By contrast, corporate employees are about aslikely to make more than the CEO as past citizens of Iraq, Libya, or 17^thcentury France were to earn more than Saddam, Kaddafi, or Louis XIV. Such restraintsto opportunity and autonomy suggest huge gains could follow from democratizing corporationsand creating more entrepreneurial opportunities for the employees within them.

Our media and attention is fixated on political – andsometimes financial – changes we could make to create jobs, but it may turn outthat such changes are merely incidental to the scope of the changes needed withincorporations.

Despite initial appearances, we’re living in a time ofincredible opportunity. Shifting our focus to overcoming the limit ofentrepreneurship will mean advances as dramatic – and at times as disorienting– as those of the last three economies. (And if you’re a student of history,you realize how very dramatic that is.) An entrepreneurial economy is ready toemerge. Millions of new jobs depend on today’s communities redefining the corporationas dramatically as past communities redefined church, state, and bank. The fourtheconomy is ready to emerge but it’s not something we’ll see as long as we stayfocused on trying to repair the third economy.

Ron Davison has consulted to some of the world’s largestcorporations and is author of The FourthEconomy: Inventing Western Civilization, available on amazon.com.

Montaigne on Trusting the Simple Man

2011-11-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

This man I had was a simple, crude fellow - a character fit to bear true witness; for clever people observe more things and more curiously, but they interpret them; and to lend weight and conviction to their interpretation, they cannot help altering history a little. They never show you things as they are, but bend and disguise them according to the way they have seen them; and to give credence to their judgment and attract you to it, they are prone to add something to their matter, to stretch it out and amplify it. We need a man either very honest or so simple that he has not the stuff to build up false inventions and give them plausibility; and wedded to no theory. Such was my man; and besides this, he at various times brought sailors and merchants, whom he had known on that trip, to see me. So I content myself with his information, without inquiring what the cosmographers say about it.
- From The Complete Works by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame.

At the Life Counter

2011-11-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

"Yes," he says, rather tentatively. "I'd like mine with more honesty, meaning, and love, please."
The guy at the counter - who strangely kept changing appearance almost like a shape in water, looking old and then young, blue skinned and then grey haired - just stared at him.
"Did you hear me," he finally asks.
The man - suddenly snapped into focus and looking like one of those apron wearing guys from 50s- style diners - laughed.
"You want more of this and less of that? Is that what you want?"
He could have sworn he heard a strong Brooklyn accent, which made this seem all the more surreal. "Well yes. Specifically, I'd like more honesty, meaning ..."
The guy at the counter interrupted with a wave of the hand. "I heard ya. I heard ya." And then he laughed.
"What? What's so funny."
"You think you're the first to want to change your order?"
He just stared. And then the man leaned across the counter and said, "You got two choices: either you choose life or you don't. The rest of it? You don't got that much choice about."
He stood there silent, now uncertain about what to do.
"So, what'll it be?"

Tweeting Through Oct 2011

2011-11-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

How Greececould pay down their debt: sue all modern countries for patent infringement onideas of democracy, science, philosophy ..

Offeringsimple and natural for Halloween this year - just dropping a tablespoon ofunrefined sugar into each kid's bag.

Now those aresome last words. Even if you don't read the whole of Steve Jobs' sister'seulogy, scroll to the botttom.http://nyti.ms/vBfEx9

This year I'mgoing as Herman Cain so I can tell trick and treaters, "If you don't havecandy it's your own fault. Go get your own candy."

A reliefpitcher was brought in just to intentionally walk a batter. So happy to knowthere's a pro athlete job for which I'm qualified.

Either my daywas far too long yesterday or I'm suffering from an acute bout of lackadaisicaltolerance.

Why name asection of a modern jet "coach?" That suggests they modeled it afterprimitive, 19th century transportation. Oh wait.

Now I know whyin science fiction those identical coveralls are popular. No need to pack luggagethat might delay you.

Idea 4 websitenamed gargle to offer cognitive cleanse (think brainwash not mouthwash) ANDpick up poor typists trying for google.

If it was upto us Americans, the one change we'd make to Canada would be to warm it upsome. Oh wait. We are.

“The troublewith quotes on the internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or notthey are genuine.” - Abraham Lincoln

His personalgoal was to hit the 101st percentile. RT @tnr Where do you fall on the @WSJ #income calculator? http://ow.ly/77N3P #OWS

Forget it andlose a century: markets untamed by democracies or democracies untamed bymarkets are just different forms of tyranny.

I wonder if insome parallel universe gravity on planets varies like climate here."Nobody lives there. It's too heavy."

Scare people?Occupy Halloween: announce at door that you're not there for a handout but willcamp out in their living room indefinitely.

Angry at thebankers? You would be too. Somehow they claim they know NOTHING about my shareof the $21 million from Nigeria.

At workdesigning my new fashion line. I'm calling it Arab Spring and will base it onGaddafi's wardrobe. http://bit.ly/o791HM

Wonder if Jobswould have received so much praise if someone had invented a device makingiPods as easy to pirate as, say, music.

Planning anovel in which characters debate whether life's defined by free will or anovelist. If it writes itself, we'll know who is right.

RT @ebertchicago: Handy WashPost chart showinghow Cain's 9-9-9 plan would affect the rich,poor and in between.http://wapo.st/ozSdps

File under,more downsizing. Due to budget cutbacks, the GOP's frontrunner has changed fromMcCain to Cain.

RT @drgrist: Word of the day: ignostic. Anignostic is someone who purposefully remains too ignorant of a problem to havea position on it.

Actually justgot a phone call that caller ID labeled, "phone scam."

#CNNDebate Favorite line of the night:Romney: "Instead of blaming like this president does ..."

#CNNDebate Once 14th amend is mentioned,GOP candidates oppose constitution? So judgment does matter as much asconstitution? So confused.

#CNNDebate Also love that Perry is so hipto the jive that he twice addressed Herman Cain as "brother."

#CNNDebate One reason to admire Rick Perry- he actually just tried to deregulate the debate, trying to confiscateRomney's time.

#CNNDebate Question for candidates: Boxersor .... professional wrestlers?

Another GOPdebate tonight. I wonder if they have secret backroom poker games to determinewho will emerge as front runner each week.

Idea forClassical Idol reality show with historical composers judged by modern popstars. "Mozart, you need a melodic hook."

Fascinating RT @tnr:2. Excellent animation of the 2012 Republican campaign as a (literal) horserace, by @Slate http://ow.ly/6YKXE

Baffled his"w/ Jesus in my heart & Buddha in my belly, all I do is singAllah-la-la-la" t-shirt offended rather than united all religions.

I Ching. You,however, Clang.

Spreading likeonline trading, occupy wall st. is now in 207 locations.http://bit.ly/pQfh3o

The avantgarde composer John Cage wrote a song 4' 33 - 4 mins and 33 seconds of silence.A guy just told me, "I have that." Don't we all?

I'm rebrandingThe 4th Economy. I'm going to call it Economy 4S.

As an apparentconcession to critics who've called him clumsy, Rick Perry is now wearing ahard hat during speeches.http://read.bi/mQKvYj

Post-gameanalysis presumes to tell you why someone won whereas post-debate analysispresumes to tell you who won.

If only he'dused his super powers for good and not evil. Apparently, even before he waspresident, Obama started a global recession.

How longbefore we have a fact check app for text we read online? To this decade whatspell check was to 80s.

RT @TIME: "Employers aren't looking for is someone whocan do the job but someone who can reinvent the job." - Thomas Friedman at #CIW11

Fromsomeecards - Let's celebrate Columbus Day by walking into someone's house andtelling them we live there now.

Bankers weregoing to occupy the inner city this weekend to protest poverty but couldn'tfind any good hotels.

The FourthEconomy is now available in France athttp://amzn.to/mYqD66 The words entrepreneur andmillionaire are already translated.

Nobel Prizewinning poet Transtromer is already featured in a video starring Shia LaBeouf.Nice. Hollywood is not all senseless violence.

Curiously,capitalist models explain the recent surge in demand for socialist models.

Whoa. Just hada little carrot wine. Really should pay closer attention to those expirationdates.

10thanniversary of invasion of Afghanistan and still we confuse war and occupation,nation-building and setting up a government.

Just becauseyour mind is simple doesn't mean the world is.

GUI beforethey were born, Pixar in childhood, iPod in adolescence. No 1 structuredconsciousness of 20-somethings more than Jobs.

Jobs obsoletedthe notion that good design and good engineering were somehow different.

RT @DanielPink: RT @WareMalcombCMO: "Your time is limited,so don't waste it living someone else's life." Steve Jobs

We have lowerclass, middle class, upper class, upper middle class, lower middle class. Isthere a lower upper class or upper lower class?

RT @fivethirtyeight: Cain, Perry, Bachmann,Trump, Giuliani, Romney, Palin, Gingrich, Huckabee, Christie all led 1 or morepolls this year.

This coffeeshop advertises an "Extreme Happy Hour." Not sure how that would, inpractice, differ from "Hysterical Hour."

#OccupyWallStreet is everywhere. Protestorspopped up when I checked my portfolio. Now marching across monitor with ittybitty signs.

"Defyaging" the ad says. Apparently it doesn't actually halt aging but doesgive it the finger.

Caller ID hasreally taken the fun out of making crank phone calls.

Why Republicans Are So Fickle About Their Front Runners

2011-11-01T16:46:00.000-07:00

I've got a couple of theories about why no Republican front runner lasts for long.

Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump, Giuliani, Romney,Palin, Gingrich, Huckabee, Christie all led one or more polls this year.Presumably the list would be longer but the election is still one year off.

It's fun to speculate about why the Republicans are so quicklychurning through front runners. My two theories have to do with the inherentcontradictions of being a Republican.

One, Republicans are contemptuous of government, convinced thatthere is almost nothing that government can do as well as the private sector –from pre-school education to funding retirement. Given this, they have evenmore contempt for politicians than the average person. How does this work whenit comes to the rise and fall of political candidates? Well, a fresh face –particularly from the business sector – looks promising for the simple factthat this is not a political face. So, poll numbers go up and very quickly, thiscandidate looks like a politician. Suddenly, Republican voters remember thatthey don’t like politicians and the poll numbers for this poor candidate dropas quickly as they rose. Republicans dislike voting for politicians which means, they don't much care to vote for people who run for office. That makes it tough.

Two, Republicans hold at least two contradictory goals. Like thoseof us who love the idea of six-pack abs and dessert after a cheese burger, Republicanshaven’t quite reconciled their love of tax cuts with their contempt fordeficits. Even now – with tax cuts at their lowest level in the 50+ years thatObama has been alive – Republicans want lower taxes. And they want the deficitreduced to zero. Anyone who does the math on this quickly realizes howuntenable this position is. How does this translate into the rise and fall ofpolitical candidates? Well, a candidate who promises tax cuts is embraced ….until he is forced to clarify that he’ll eliminate social security or willignore deficits or will cut defense spending. Given that no candidate can tellvoters how he or she will do the impossible, no candidate has a chance ofholding favor.

Republicans have got to feel like the guy who has had a mad crushon that one gorgeous girl all of high school and then – when she finally walksup to him to chat – can’t form a coherent thought or say anything intelligible.The economy continues to stagnate and Obama is terribly vulnerable right now.But the Republicans? They have what has to be their least inspiring and leastcredible candidates since the party was formed. It wouldn't take much for them to change this: just a willingness to subordinate their ideology to math and necessity (in this case, the necessity of having a government, one inevitably run by politicians).

The Virtual Halloween

2011-11-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

How about a virtual Halloween?

Go to a website where you get to see video snippets and still photos of every kind of costume - from cute to clever and everything in between. Much higher quality and much more rapid than waiting for the door bell to ring. Lots could be done with this. (Thumbs up or thumbs down gradually tailors pictures offered.)

Then, periodically, you have to hit a "donate" button that puts money into a fund for impoverished kids. Your equivalent of handing out candy, but in this case it'd be a mix of carbs, protein, and fats to needy kids.

The Worthlessness of Should

2011-10-31T10:31:00.000-07:00

If you want to get to New York, it does little good to reiterate that you should be in New York. The first step is knowing where you are and accepting that, because how you go about getting to New York depends entirely on where you are.

This seems the paradox of change. Nothing changes until or unless you first accept where you are. You can't find your way to New York if you start out denying that you're in Florida.

And here is another curious bit about this acceptance. Not only can you start with acceptance of where you are as a starting point, you might - as you look at it for what it is rather than in light of what it should be - you might just realize that there is nothing wrong with being in Florida.

The paradox, then, is that only people who are accepting of what is can change what is.

Or so it seems to me.

Blessed and Persecuted Saints

2011-10-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

Saint Louis now has 11 world series championships.
San Diego still has the same number as when baseball started. Yep. Zero.

St. Louis has less than a million people, while San Diego has more than three million.

The only reasonable conclusion to reach is that surfing is more of a distraction to becoming a great ball player than is farming.

Ron Paul is Not a Conservative - He's a Reactionary

2011-10-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain and Ron Paul are not conservatives. They are reactionaries. They do not want to preserver the status quo but instead want to return to an earlier state of development. Barack Obama is a conservative.

When Martin Luther labeled the pope the anti-Christ and declared that we are all priests, he took on the status quo. He moved the West forward and away from a world where the pope could dictate what people thought and believed. The people who resisted his Protestant Revolution were conservatives, trying to hold on to the status quo.

Henry VIII followed in Martin Luther's protestant ways, declaring himself the head of the Church of England and breaking ties to the pope in Rome. When his Catholic daughter Mary became queen, she tried to take England back to Catholicism. She wanted to undo the error of her father's Protestant ways. (Which, among other things, caused her father to commit the grievous sin of divorcing her mother.) Mary, trying to rid England of the Church of England, was a reactionary. (Actually, they called her Bloody Mary because she had so many Protestants executed, but Reactionary Mary has a ring to it.)

Resist change - conservative.
Reverse change - reactionary.

By that measure, Ron Paul is a reactionary. I have trouble understanding how the policies he recommends would be much different from what we had before 1913. From 1837 to 1913, for instance, the US had no central bank, no Federal Reserve. Ron Paul would like us to believe that a central bank is the cause of things like recessions but during this period there were plenty of economic problems - including recessions AND depressions that originated in the financial sector. In any case, Ron Paul would, like Queen Mary with the Church of England, correct an error of a previous generation and rid us of the Fed. People like he and Herman Cain would love to rid us of all the ills of the twentieth century - from business regulations put in place to end egregious practices like child labor and rampant pollution to social programs like unemployment insurance and social security. They'd like to return us to the economy we had from about 1800 to 1900. That was - for those of you who skipped those chapters in your history books - an ugly time, even if considerably better than the Dark Ages to which Reactionary Mary would have returned England.

It would be fascinating if we actually had a progressive option to complement this small menu of reactionary and conservative choices.

A Simple Solution for Greek Debt

2011-10-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

Once Greece became a part of the euro zone, they were able to borrow money for far less than they had when they had to pay the going rate for Greek currency. This, among other things, led to unsustainable levels of debt that Greece simply can't afford to pay down. The government has passed austerity measures, raising taxes and cutting government spending and in the process slowing the economy and triggering riots. Even with this, they aren't going to pay down their debt.

There are two silly options. One, they can sue all modern countries for patent infringement on concepts like democracy and philosophy. Two, they could continue to make the attempt to pay down their debt, something that might require paying about 20% of GDP per year. Both possible but wildly improbable.

Before I make my simple suggestion for how to resolve this, let me tell you what I'm not whining about. I'm not whining about the fact that my portfolio has taken a serious hit. Again. Also, my house has dropped a huge amount in the last few years. Because of fluctuations in housing and stock markets, my net worth has dropped by tens of percent. I wish this hadn't happened but you know what? This is what it means to invest. You accept risk in return for ... well, for returns. You don't whine about the loss. You don't demand that some bank or company give you money for what your house or stocks were once worth. You accept the lose and move on. Why is it that we think bond investors should be exempt from this reality of investing?

So, Greece cannot pay back its debt. Why not write it down? Why not pay off half or less? Investors will lose money, of course. Join the club.

Will this create problems? Yes. Every solution will. But the sooner debt is written off, the sooner the Greek government can begin with something short of radical contractions in spending that risk triggering a recession or even depression.

My Favorite Exchange From Last Night's Debate

2011-10-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

I do think that this exchange between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry was my favorite of the night. "Why do you think I have this outrageous Texan accent?"

Just Because You Object to Abortion Doesn't Make Your Objection Objective

2011-10-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

The debate about abortion is a debate about when life begins.

The pope argues that the purpose of sex is for procreation,not pleasure, and that it is sin to interrupt sex with any birth control thatwould suppress its purpose, denying life to some new soul. In a sense (and I’msure he’d never say it like this), the pope teaches that life begins at themoment of ejaculation.

Most Protestants disagree with this religious belief. SomeProtestants – essentially the religious right in the US – believe instead that lifebegins at conception. Based on this belief, they have no problem with any kindof birth control but do want to make all abortions illegal. And I think thatthey share the pope’s disapproval of sex as something to be used just formindless pleasure.

And of course secular folks and other religious folks don't base their decision on what popes or Protestants believe.

Now it is worth pointing out that at the moment ofconception the new life doesn’t look much different from what it looks like atthe moment before; whether we’re talking about separate egg and sperm or a newlyformed zygote combining the two, we’re talking about something too small to seewith the naked eye.

I think that this belief that life begins at conception is moredefensible than the belief that it begins at ejaculation, if only because it isless comfortable to say ejaculation during a public debate. But in both cases,we’re talking about a life that has no viable chance outside of the womb, lifethat is less conscious of its surroundings than the simplest insect, a lifethat bears less resemblance to a baby than does any mammal. If we say that life begins at conception we - like those arguing it starts at ejaculation - are not arguing that it is recognizably human at that moment but instead are arguing for its potential. That is, we’reexpressing a belief, not stating a fact, when we say that this is when human lifebegins.

Most people in the US – religious or otherwise – believe thatlife begins sometime between conception and birth. They don’t know preciselywhen but they seem to believe that at the moment before birth, life in the wombis hardly different from the new born baby it is about to become and at themoment after conception, life in the womb is hardly different from the sperm andegg it recently was. Most people believe that while it is harder to pinpoint thestart of life in this nine month window, it is more reasonable to locate itsomewhere other than at its extreme end points.

This question about when life begins can be answered byreligion, philosophy, or science, but it cannot be answered definitely by anyone of these. Different scientists, different philosophers, and differentreligious people will reach different conclusions about when life starts. Makingthis determination requires judgment.

The argument for legal abortion rests on thisfact: reasonable, conscientious people will disagree about when life begins.

What do most Americans believe? Well, about two-thirdsbelieve that a woman has a right to an abortion in the first trimester (which isto say, they believe that life does not begin until at least three months afterconception). By contrast, only about a third of Americans believe thatabortions should be legal in the final trimester, roughly up to the point ofbirth.

If we were going to use the democratic approach to decidingabortion law, we’d probably have the following:

- A federal law that gave women in any state theright to an abortion in the first trimester

- State laws that may or may not give women theright to an abortion in the second trimester

- Abortion in the third trimester made illegal exceptin cases where the mother’s life is threatened.

Again, this is not a question about whether a woman has the rightto kill a baby because she wants a better life, one with the promise of moreeconomic prosperity and freedom. She doesn’t have that right. The issue ofabortion instead stems from a legitimate question about when life begins.

The question of whether one person can kill another in the hopesof economic prosperity and freedom is instead one we should ask when questioningwhether to go to war to “liberate” another country, knowing that this decisioncarries with it the inevitable destruction of lives that are years and decades past the pointof conception. Individuals don't have that right; apparently states do.

Oh and as a footnote? Even if a person wants to base herdecision about abortion on the Bible (obviously not a basis for modern law), she’ll have little guidance. There is atleast one verse that mentions God knowing us even in the womb, implying that a fetus has the rights of a person. But it also states in Exodus 21:22 that if a man injures a woman so she miscarries, heshould be fined. In a kingdom that meted out the death penalty for fornication,though, this punishment is fairly mild. Miscarry through violence is not anabortion chosen by the woman, by the way; this is an abortion performed againsther will. Obviously, in the Old Testament they did not consider life in the wombto have the same rights as a newborn baby. Finally, Jesus never touches on abortion or when life begins. Even if you want to base your personal decision on the Bible, you areleft to your own judgment. And it is the exercise of that judgment, apparently, that so offends those who would make abortion illegal.

Oh, and lest you think that this simple clarification should be dated and irrelevant - as I once did - I'd like to point out that the good people of Mississippi will vote on a (state) constitutional amendment that rules that life begins at the moment of conception - opinion become law.

A Post in Which Your Blog Author Engages in Racism

2011-10-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

The Republicans are like white men dancing. They've no sense of economic rhythm.

During the Bush years, Republicans applauded deficit spending, cheering for two military invasions coupled with tax cuts. Dick Cheney announced that "deficits don't matter." Fiscal policy - that mix of tax cuts and government spending - was expansionary and just created a bubble in an economy where jobs and incomes were barely keeping pace with population growth and inflation. Fiscal policy helped to create a housing bubble.

Now, with unemployment at its highest in decades, Republicans seem to think that only deficits matter. States and local governments have been shedding jobs at least as fast as companies can create them. Now that the private sector is - at best - sluggish, the Republican tilt is towards fiscal policy that contracts the economy. They aren't advocating tax hikes but they are demanding that government budgets be slashed. Sadly, the only attempt at coordination between the parties seems to be on the need for a fiscal policy that contracts; Republicans want more spending cuts and Democrats want tax hikes.

David Cameron of the UK is a smart, charismatic politician who heads the Conservative Party and is now the British Prime Minister. For about a year and a half, he's been engaged in an austerity program, raising taxes and slashing spending. His intention is to get Britain back on track. The result? Economic growth of 0.1% and the highest jobless numbers in 15 years.

Deficits matter. But not nearly as much as unemployment. Any program that has a hope of working has to first address unemployment and GDP growth AND THEN deficits. To reverse that is to risk falling into a downward spiral.

At the root of the problem is an obsolete worldview that sees the government as simply a big household. Any sane person running a household budget will cut spending in down times and raise them in good. This is not just sensible, it is intuitive. But applied to the level of the macroeconomy, it is a wildly misleading intuition, akin to the notion that it is the sun that orbits the earth rather than vice versa. What is obvious is wrong. To offset expansions that can create inflation in prices of goods or even stocks and houses, the government should actually spend less, tax more, be more austere in times of plenty. This is the opposite of what a household should do. A government should dampen economic cycles, not exacerbate them. And when times are tough, rather than practice austerity, governments should spend freely and tax lightly, stimulating spending, investment, and job creation when the private sector is lagging.

The debate between whether government should constitute 25% or 50% of the economy is a legitimate one and Republicans have every right to argue for smaller government as counter balance to progressives who argue for larger government. That's fine. What's absurd and totally dangerous is calling for fiscal austerity, for smaller government, in the midst of a downturn. Failure to understand this distinction is either willful or stupid.

The fact of governments needing to offset business cycles is not new. This is something well known and well documented. It defines macroeconomics. And it is past time that the Republicans find their economic Arthur Murray who can teach them to hear the rhythm and respond to it. If they don't the result is going to be even more ugly.

Changing the Political Conversation from Debate to Negotiation

2011-10-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

I can't help but wonder if we've gone through three stages in our political conversation. Years ago, in stage one, politicians talked to complexity in fairly complex terms. More recently, in stage two, politicians simplified a reality they realized was complex into sound bites. Now, it seems as though politicians have come to believe their own sound bites, confusing their simplifications of it with actual reality. How else to explain Herman Cain's 9-9-9 proposal that would slash revenues in a time of chronic deficits and zero out capital gains tax but create a 9% national sales tax?

I blame the League of Women Voters for this. They were the early sponsors of presidential debates who agreed to debating terms that essentially meant that a candidate had only to defend his position for - at most - two minutes. The debates became the forum for discussions about real issues that were, necessarily, simplified.

Which brings me to my point.

My buddy Eric made a really insightful comment. He asked why we have candidates debate when the real test of their time in office is their ability to negotiate across the aisle, reaching an agreement with folks who have a different ideology?

So, why not replace debates with live negotiations? Rather than have Obama debate fine points of disagreement with Hillary Clinton, why not have him come to some agreement with Eric Cantor? Or instead of hearing Rick Santorum attack Mitt Romney over some minor disagreement, why not hear him try to reach an agreement with Harry Reid?

Wouldn't a negotiation tell us much more about a candidate's ability to govern than a debate? And wouldn't it force them out of sound bites, force them to do more to acknowledge the complexity of reality? And wouldn't it tell us much more about what they might actually accomplish as opposed to just what legislation they might oppose?

It's a fairly simple idea. But it just might make things more complex and interesting.

The debate question: Are you still deregulating your wife?

2011-10-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

In Topeka Kansas, it is now legal to beat your wife. Or, rather, given they haven't the budget to deal with wife beaters, they've simply repealed the ban on wife beating.

I'm glad that we're finally getting some clarification on the particulars of deregulation.

California Invents a New Kind of Corporation

2011-10-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

Here's a bit of social invention that's worth mentioning. (Thank you @Tisiwoota at Twitter for pointing me to this.)

California became the first state to legalize a Flexible Purpose Corporation and the sixth to enable the creation of a Benefit Corporation. There's a great summary by Kyle Westaway here.

Put simply, a Benefit Corporation does not have to primarily serve shareholders but can choose to balance returns to shareholders with other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, and the environment. The Flexible Purpose Corporation actually articulates a purpose or mission in its charter. It might, for instance, have a purpose of employing the poor.

We rightfully laud computers, smart phones, cars ... and tend to forget that they were enabled by an earlier social invention called the corporation. One can hardly imagine what will emerge from these new types of corporations that have even more autonomy to create what makes sense.

Why is this so cool? It will free up communities to use one of the most powerful social inventions ever (the corporation) without being bound to profit maximization. I explain it more here in an excerpt from my book, The Fourth Economy.

After the nation-state emerged as more powerful than thechurch, it took centuries for it to let go of the idea that its goal was thesame as that of the church. The nation-state got its power from control overland, the first economy’s limit to progress. Yet for the longest time, monarchsthought it their obligation to also look after the souls of their citizenry. Itwould have seemed irresponsible not to. “Bloody” Mary used violence to moveEngland towards Catholicism, and her younger sister Elizabeth used violence tomove it back towards Anglicanism.

Once the nation-state became a tool for improving one’scondition in this life and not the next, once rulers gave up on dictatingreligion, a great deal of grief was avoided and a great deal of good could bedone.

It’s probably not surprising that the newly dominantinstitution would think it should prove itself by meeting the goals of thepreviously dominant institution. Those goals become so intertwined through allof society that legitimacy depends on at least acknowledging those old goals.It is hard to imagine a Renaissance king dismissing religion as unimportant forpolicy, saying that he would focus on GDP growth instead, for instance. (Forone thing, GDP is a measure we didn’t even have until about a century ago.)

So as the corporation emerged to compete with the bank asthe most powerful institution in the West, it adopted the goals of the bank.That is, it saw its purpose as profit.

On the surface, this hardly seems problematic. It is, youmight say, a fact of life. But as John Abramson points out, the purpose ofpharmaceutical companies is not to maximize the health of Americans; it is,instead, to maximize profits. This is problematic. He cites a World HealthOrganization study that ranks the US health 15^th overall in theworld, a ranking that drops to 37^th if that ranking adjusts for perperson spending on healthcare.[1]This in spite of the fact that US healthcare costs per person are double thatof any other developed nation. Maximizing profits does not automaticallymaximize health.

The former management gurus Peter Drucker and Russell Ackoffboth have claimed that profit is to a corporation what oxygen is to a person:vital but by no means its purpose. Companies have to make profit but they don’thave to subordinate everything to it.

Robert Beyster, a man who helped to create billions inwealth, wrote that profit was a clear goal for the divisions within his companySAIC, but the goal was not profit maximization. He acknowledges that beingprivately held by employees exempted them from many of the pressures thatpublicly held companies feel to subordinate everything else to profits. (Andcuriously, SAIC’s performance with such an approach was such that any investorwould have been lucky to hold its stock. More on this later.)

To make explicit that something other than profits shoulddirect corporate behavior is to suggest that corporations have to define thekind of life they are trying to create for customers, investors, employees, andtheir community. This is – it seems – a fairly interesting starting point forany corporation. It suggests that thecorporation will more explicitly become a tool for helping the individual tocreate the life of his own choosing – even if that individual is not a CEO.

[1] John Abramson, MD., OverdosedAmerica: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (HarperCollins, New York,NY, 2004) 46.

Ratio of Clued in to Clueless

2011-10-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

This has the flavor of an old man's rant, but wasn't there a time when it seemed more obviously the case that the folks in charge had a clue about what to do? Is it simply because we realize how little they actually do know that the ratio of clue to clueless has fallen so precipitously? Or do the folks in charge actually look more confused of late?

10th Anniversary of Afghanistan Invasion

2011-10-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

It’s worth asking about the difference betweennation-building and state-building.

10th anniversary of invasion of Afghanistan and still we confuse war and occupation, nation-building and setting up a government.

State is the government – the bureaucracy, administration,laws, standing army …

Nation is the sense of shared identity that makes a peoplefeel more like Americans than Virginians or more like Italians than Venetians.That’s a tougher thing to create. (It wasn’t until AFTER the Gettysburg Addressthat we got the term “the United States is” rather than the “the United Statesare.”)

It seems like there are at least two errors we’re making inAfghanistan.

1. Wekeep talking about a war. It’s not a war. The war quickly ended. Now it’s an occupation.

2. Wekeep talking about nation-building when really all we’re doing is statebuilding. Their sense of self is tribal, not national.

We never did nation-building in the Marshall Plan. Japan andGermany were very much nations before WWII. All we did was some economicdevelopment and some state-building. That’s a terribly impressive, but much easier, task. Or, put differently, rebuilding a government and economy within years after a war is a huge but doable task. By contrast, there is no evidence that outside forces can build a nation in just a decade or two - or even at all. History suggests that this is a task that has to be done organically and over a generation or two or three.

Words to Live By from a Man Who Just Died

2011-10-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

‎"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the mostimportant tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big decisions in life.Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear ofembarassment or failure, these things fall away in the face of death leavingonly what is truly important. Remembering you are going to die is the best wayI know to avoid the trap of thinking you havesomething to lose. You are already naked - there is no reason not to followyour heart. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people'sthinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own innervoice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition- they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else issecondary"

- - Steve Jobs - 1955 - 2011

September 2011 Tweets

2011-10-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

The original Hawaiian shirt wasactually just a tan and a sleeve tattoo.

It would probably be helpful if wehad at least one growth industry other than disaster recovery. Here comesanother big storm.

Fittingly, it was the only line ofdialogue needed: "Stranger, you're about as welcome here as dialogue in anaction movie."

Another month in which governmentofficials express surprise at a jobs report reporting layoffs in governmentsector

When things go retro, I'm ready, alreadystarting to transcribe popular YouTube videos into flip books.

One more vote for embodied cognition:sometimes a hug helps you to think better.

T-shirt idea. California Surfers -Give us a Break.

Bob Dylan quoting some old soulsinger, “Money may not be the key to happiness but with enough money you canget a key made.”

Labor Day is a capital idea.

San Francisco is planning to crackdown on sudden surge in nudists, debating a law that would .... require them tocarry towels.

So, they closed Southern California.That would be more amusing if I wasn't trying to fly home to San Diego thisevening.

Isabelle Allende, "Writing abook is like falling in love with the wrong lover." She might be talkingabout an abusive relationship.

Entitlement thinking. Pay into socialsecurity, think you're entitled to retirement. Pay mortgage, think you'reentitled to own a home.

Ah. I love San Diego best.

B&N has a Teen Paranormal RomanceSection. Isn't that redundant?

10 years ago marked the last day ofAmerican exceptionalism - the last day to believe violent tragedy only happened"over there."

Adult books, the sign says. You wouldthink that meant no picture books.

e-autistic: someone sociallyunresponsive due to disinterest or dysfunction when it comes to emails, voicemails, or texts.

Well, one can only hope after lastweek's blackout that San Diego officials have decided on a kinder, gentler"go green" approach.

So what does it say about men thatthey merely like love stories?

Perry clarified that he cannot bebought for $5,000. A bidding frenzy ensued by lobbyists eager to determine justwhat the amount is.

Sane candidates who fight for realpeople still exist. Elizabeth Warren is running for the Senate. http://bit.ly/oxOs9n

To my great amusement and delight,Thomas starts a meme with my book: http://bit.ly/oNAkKt

They money we spend on health care isno match for the money spent on health apathy.

Last week power outage across county.Yesterday border closed due to structural collapse. Xenophobic vandal at workin San Diego?

Think that @im_allen_warren should found first pro footballmarching band.

Confucius was asked if 1 word couldserve as prescription for all of one's life. After a lengthy pause he said,"reciprocity."

Biz idea: sell air guitars. Cost isZERO plus it is a product that can be sold and downloaded online.

Celebrating the dyslexic'sQuinceañera today.

Stimulus? What about the ATM randomenhancement program that occasionally supplements someone's withdrawal by $20.... or $20,000.

Farm Ville employs 2,000. Hmm. So youcan create real jobs providing people the virtual experience of having a job.http://bit.ly/qgg6Mp

"Exit stage left, pursued by abear." - William Shakespeare

For a quick inventory of yourignorance, just try to explain or teach.

Don't ask, don't tell ended today.That's terrible. W/o those options, how are soldiers supposed to initiateconversations? Gunfire?

Generally, the more we understand aperson or situation, the more accepting we are. Now if you could just getpeople to understand that.

4 of the last 5 presidents (Reagan,Bush1, Clinton & Obama) were left-handed. We most trust someone who is likelooking in a mirror?

REM announces split. From now, theywill be referred to as R E M.

Wonder how long before email has a"like" button to acknowledge receipt and agreement w/o response. Thedigital nod of head.

Tonight's GOP debate would beenhanced with fact checkers and a dunk tank. 3rd lie or distortion and you goin.

At stacked for lunch. Order off iPadis cool. Calling appetizers apps in that context is just confusing.

RT @TheTweetOfGod:The Inuit have over 50 words for "visiting ethnolinguist."

I was pretty excited by Herb Cain's"Chilean model" suggestion for retirement until I realized that I hadgoogle image search on.

Undergraduate admission rate atHarvard: 6.2%. Rate at which applicants were hired on McDonald's NationalHiring Day: 6.2%.

Overheard yesterday: "I'm onfacebook all the time and I still don't have a clue what's going on."

If Ron Paul is president, he'llderegulate baseball. Call it brawlball. 1st move - layoff all the umps.

Fluent? He spoke French like MarcelMarceau.

Appalled that only 50% of collegeteams won today, legislators passed a "no team left behind" billrequiring that rise to 90% by 2020

Still working out kinks on world'sfastest drive thru window. Pay swipe works but food and drink handoff at 55 mphstill problematic.

Perry, like Fred Thompson in '08, isanother in a series of candidates wooed then rejected. GOP the political equivalentof man-eater?

I think I'll open a Ronberto's.

We've always had something fasterthan the speed of light. It's called imagination.

Google's 13th birthday today. This isworrisome. First it'll pretend to know everything and then it won't talk to us.

RT @JohnFugelsang:Hi, it's Michele Bachmann, is Sen Lieberman in?- No he's not, this is RoshHashanah. -OK, Mr. Hashanah can I leave a msg?

RT @TheOnion:[audio] Typo Results In 10,000 Acre Wyoming Skate Park http://onion.com/ocvuZ7

We don’t know enough about the futureto ever know how much impact one life can have.

The problem is never how to get new,innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.

As Facebook becomes its own medium,how long before a secondary market emerges to provide fictional friends toentertain us?

Not convinced that we need a moreentrepreneurial economy? Since 2000, work force has grown by 28 million butjobs by only 400,000.

A band with this name wouldn't evenhave to be that good to be really good: TV on the Radiohead.

Republicans think that Chris Christieshould run. I don't know. Even biking or aerobics would probably help.

Men, Women & Sex - Republicans and Their Candidates

2011-09-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

Studies suggest the biggest difference between men and women when it comes to sex lies in what it takes to trigger desire. A man can be triggered by a single thing - amazing eyes, pert breasts, shapely legs, a great laugh. A woman, by contrast, needs multiple triggers. These triggers aren't always the same but they would include looks, personality, social status, physical fitness, and a sense of humor. One of the things that makes it harder to predict who a woman will be attracted to is that it is not just one thing, but it could be different things. A rich guy who is also kind might attract her in spite of being physically unattractive or a good looking guy without a sense of humor but who is kind to children might attract her. Women's calculations are more complex.

The Republicans have seemingly wearied of Rick Perry already and are now making noises about how much they like Chris Christie. They are now flirting with a new candidate. Now it could be that the Republican Party is the maneater of politics, chewing up and spitting out candidates as a way to break up their boredom. Or it could be that the attraction of a candidate and a president are as different as the attraction of a man and a woman.

A candidate needs to have only one really remarkable or interesting feature. Like men attracted to a woman, at the early stage of "would you consider this candidate" part of politics, a candidate has to have only one feature that folks like. Ron Paul's desire to eliminate any part of government not listed in the constitution is enough to attract Republicans, for instance. But when it comes time to actually making someone president, those same voters become women. They note that the package of pluses and minuses suddenly doesn't work. They don't like the idea of legalizing drugs, or eliminating social security and medicare. They don't get their multiple triggers, don't reach a threshold of net gains sufficient to say yes to the candidate.

Women are choosier when it comes to mates because they have the raise children and would like the sperm donor to also be a good father. Voters are choosier when it comes to actually picking a president because governing is more complex than just debating some exciting or controversial ideas. Before he strips down to just his boxers, Christie might want to make sure that it's the woman in the voter who is beckoning him and not just the man.

Practical Karma

2011-09-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

There are lots of reasons to make positive karma deposits. I wonder if one of them isn't simply the practical benefit of what it does for your imagination.

To make an emotional deposit for someone suggests that you know what would be a positive for them and you can take that (sometimes) vague notion and turn it into a concrete deed or gift. The simple, practical benefit of that? It exercises your mind to think of others. If you live in a market economy, that means you're staying fit in the domain of creating value; whether you're an employee or entrepreneur, that sort of fitness makes you more valuable.

But you didn't really need that practical inducement, did you?

Blue Tire Technology

2011-09-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

I think it would be interesting to have a technology that lets cars communicate to each other, a variant on blue tooth technology that lets gadgets communicate.

If we could do this, we could synchronize car speeds, letting cars move like flocks of birds. This could save money by letting cars move into each other's slip stream and by letting cars move in unison and in coordination with traffic lights.

As it becomes more advanced, it would allow collision avoidance and perhaps even auto-pilot (or auto-driver) capability.

Blue tire technology. I think I'm going to go file the patent now. I'll figure out the technology later.

Financial Market Explanations as Personality Test

2011-09-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

After the financial meltdown, people have pointed fingers. Who they blame seems to say more about their ideology than the reality of financial markets.

The Black Plague that began about 1350 killed about 30% of Europeans. When it hit a village, though, most people assumed that it was the result of sin. The question wasn't about disease transmission but instead about behavior and attitudes.

In today's world, we seem to understand systems dynamics about as well as medieval Europeans understood disease. That is, the gyrations of financial markets are a mystery to us. And how do we explain big falls? As a function of behavior and attitudes. We blame policy makers who made the wrong kinds of loans to the wrong kinds of people or greedy bankers.

If you hear someone blame government regulators who blame government policy makers for making loans to poor people who couldn't afford their loans, you're talking to a conservative.

If you hear someone blame greedy bankers who recklessly endangered the whole system, you are talking to a liberal.

That is, the popular opinions you'll hear tell you lots about who you are listening to and almost nothing about what actually happened.

Maybe it is time to take system dynamics as seriously as we take disease - and stop seeing financial catastrophes as punishment for past sin.

Defending Solyndra - or why DC isn't ready for the new economy

2011-09-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

Solyndra is a Bay Area solar company that sucked down about $500 million in private sector funding and then got another $500 million in government money before filing for bankruptcy. As further proof that national politicians and media aren't ready for the new economy, everyone is talking about what a terrible investment this was. I disagree.

The old school finance is all about minimizing risk. Making a loan at, say, 10%, the old school banker tries to minimize losses.

Venture capital is different. It is about maximizing returns. Taking a stake in a company, a venture capital firm can get a return of 100% or 10,000%. So venture capitalists (VCs) are not as worried about losing money. They take risks because they know that startups are uncertain and because they'll get back lots on the few that win, hoping to make enough to offset the ones that disappear.

The success or failure of a single company is no proof that a VC is good or bad. You have to judge a portfolio of companies before you can know.

Think about the investment in Solyndra, a solar energy company. Even if it didn't work, more jobs would be created for a time. More would be learned about what did and didn't work in an industry that promises to be huge within a generation. The community had more to gain than just its return on capital. And of course, had it worked, the benefits would have been huge. There is no equivalent to Google or Gentech in the solar energy space. Not yet.

The US economy did not really take off after the Great Depression until massive sums were spent for World War 2. Once the war ended, the economy did not falter. So many of the technologies that came out of aggressive government spending during the war - beneficiaries of money spent to solve problems in fields as varied as aviation, computing, diagnostic equipment, and medicine. Companies like TWA and IBM were able to turn these technologies into business opportunities. Lots of money was "wasted" pursuing bad ideas during the war, but those didn't matter; what mattered was that the failures occurred in a sea of activity that included great breakthroughs and seemingly mundane - but important - problem solving that made these industries possible.

We have a glut of unemployed people and a lack of practical ways to make solar power competitive and widespread. It seems to me that it would have been a waste not to spend money to use the glut to fill in the lack. VCs invest in dozens or hundreds of companies that you never hear about for every one that becomes a household name. The fact that the government could not avoid a bad bet investment in such a space is not proof that such investments are bad. With unemployment so high, it seems like the government has even more to gain from such investments. The Solyndra investment should not be criticized - it should be learned from.

Entrepreneurship - Not That Important .... Yet

2011-09-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

Google offers this cool way to track the frequency of words or phrases in books in their books Ngram Viewer.

First, we can see from this graph that entrepreneurship has become more frequently written about in the last half century, in keeping with my premise that entrepreneurship is becoming more important.

Meanwhile, we can see that capital and labor have battled for mention in books, labor actually surpassing capital twice - once during the roaring twenties and again right after World War II - before falling back down in apparent importance.

But a particular kind of labor - knowledge workers dependent on information and information technology - has risen to prominence. Using a proxy for this (an admittedly overly-inclusive proxy) we can see that information HAS surpassed capital.

But to give you some idea of how relatively unimportant entrepreneurship is still considered, look at this comparison between entrepreneurship and capital.

You can barely make out entrepreneurship along the bottom of this graph.

Capital - trillions of dollars worth slosh about the globe in search of higher returns - still dominates the literature. It seems as though we have quite a lot of work to do to change that.

A Cheap Way to Create Jobs - Subsidizing Sarbanes - Oxley for IPOs

2011-09-19T17:22:00.000-07:00

In 1999, there were 486 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in the US and unemployment was 4.2 percent, the lowest it had been in 30 years.

In 2009, there were only 63 IPOs and unemployment had jumped to 10.1 by October of that year.

The drive to efficiency means that companies will always be shedding jobs and to counterbalance that, we need an equal number of new jobs created by expansion and start ups. We need IPOs.

One of the differences between 1999 and 2009 is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which added millions to the cost of an IPO.

I like the idea of regulations to make sure that investors have good information about companies, but it seems like we'd want to do all we could to encourage IPOs. Maybe the cost of Sarbanes-Oxley could be covered by the government for IPOs? For all the money we spend on supposed jobs creation plans, it is hard to think of one that would more directly fund job creation than making it cheaper for new companies to go public.

What About Venture Capital for the Public Sector?

2011-09-17T15:30:00.000-07:00

Scott Lewis hosted an Idea Tournament today.

It was, at the risk of sounding recursive, a pretty cool idea.

Quite simply, about 23 folks had 90 seconds each to present ideas as varied as closing streets once per quarter to create temporary parks or play areas, levying a congestion tax for cars as a means to simultaneously raise revenues for public transportation and lessen congestion, and allowing popular incumbents to be exempted from term limits. The winner proposed UCBC - The University of California Baja California - a university that would literally straddle the border between the US and Mexico. (How Scott Lewis is going to get the money for this proposal is still unclear. Especially to Scott.)

As interesting as this concept of an Idea Tournament is, it suggested to me something even more promising. I can see this evolving over the next 5 to 10 years into a forum for introducing something sadly lacking in government: the public sector equivalent of venture capital.

Venture capital finances ideas, stimulating innovation that traditional banks might never finance. The results of venture capital in the private sector are amazing, giving us an incredible array of technologies and companies, from computers to genetic engineering.

If an entrepreneur has an idea for creating value in the private sector, no matter how disruptive it is, she has the potential to find funding from angel investors, venture capitalists and then, finally, the stock market. The invention of venture capital has helped to trigger countless technological inventions and new companies.

So what about the public sector? How are community needs addressed there? If an entrepreneur has an idea that won't create any profit but will create value - ideas that reduce homelessness, create safer parks, stimulate learning, reduce congestion, make areas more beautiful, or politicians more effective .... well, there simply isn't any financing for such a thing. There are foundations to fund the occasional proposal. The occasional visionary community might pass a bond. Even - an increasingly rare event in a time of austerity - state or local governments might fund some promising project. But for the most part, we simply have no equivalent to venture capital for the public sector.

All that to say that I could see Scott's Idea Tournament evolving into venture capital for the public sector within ten years. Imagine governments setting aside a portion of their budget to fund such ventures, social experiments and promising projects alike. Imagine innovation in government that could do as much to improve quality of life in communities as innovation in the private sector has done for quality of life in the home.

It's an idea worth considering.

A Little Tea Party With My Invisible Friend Bernard

2011-09-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

It had been a long time since I'd had lunch with my octogenarian buddy Bernard. He looked well, full of life. I soon learned that the color in his cheeks was less a sign of health than anger.

"Are you following the Republican race," he queried me before I was even fully slid into the booth. "They've all been dunked into that teacup party, like stale cookies you're trying to hide the taste of."

"You don't like the tea party?"

"Ha!" He refused to answer while he -curiously enough - poured sugar into his tea.

"This Perry character. Oh my." Bernard just shook his head.

"What? You're against alliteration? Don't like the sound of President Perry?"

Bernard just stared at me. "Moron," he said. "If he gets in, we'll have to deal with another four to eight years of some guy proving his manhood as compensation for earlier life choices that might be construed as effeminate."

"What?" This time I was genuinely puzzled about what he was saying.

"Like Bush, he was a cheerleader in college. His base are not the kind of folks who would instinctively approve of such a thing. In fact, many of them would take that as proof that the man was a little limp-wristed. The result?" He raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. "The result is that Perry has to do things like execute more criminals than anyone else. And when he's president, like Bush he'll have to invade countries that are marginally related to any real threats to this country. The problem is, he has to prove himself. At our expense. Of course, he's still not the one pulling the switch on the accused. Or storming the walls of the enemy's castle. He's still just the cheerleader, up there making noises and rallying the crowd behind the attack. All his attempts to prove that he's more than a cheerleader are further proof that he's just a cheerleader."

"That actually makes sense. Kind of."

"Of course it makes sense. Everyone in my generation minored in psychology," Bernard said. "We had to understand the subconscious to hold our own in civilized society the same way that your generation has to understand computers."

"Well can you explain why those Tea Party people get so excited about the chance to kill a condemned man or even a poor kid who failed to pay his insurance premiums or even a 13 year old girl who engages in premarital sex but get so riled up about abortion?"

"They don't want heaven to be crowded."

"What?"

"They know that if we all live long enough, most of us will fail to qualify for their heaven. We'll do or believe the wrong thing - something irresponsible like murder or failure to budget correctly or question their authority - and then be imperfect - be disqualified to live in their heaven. By contrast, they know that a fetus is innocent. Too many of those and heaven will be crowded with more than just their friends and family. Too crowded. Worse, many of them won't even be the right color or ethnic group."

"You are an idiot," I told him with some blend of accusation and affection.

"It helps to be a little idiotic if you want to make sense of things."

And then I decided to join Bernard and ordered a tea.

Maybe It's Time To Bring the Troops Home

2011-09-14T18:38:00.001-07:00

The Tea Party - Conservatives with Compassion Fatigue

2011-09-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

So I've been trying to understand what distinguishes the Tea Party from ordinary Republicans.

Last week, Rick Perry got huge applause for being the man who has governed over more executions than any other governor in the US. Last night, Ron Paul got huge applause for stating that a young man in a coma who had previously failed to buy medical insurance should be left to die.

Whereas ordinary Republicans might be akin to football players or even ultimate fighting athletes, perfectly comfortable with violence, the Tea Party enthusiasts are more like gladiators, perfectly comfortable with death and ready to levy a death penalty even for infractions as seemingly innocuous as failure to pay premiums for medical insurance.

We've come a long way from compassionate conservatives.

Perry's Ponzi Scheme

2011-09-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight, one of Perry's supporters clarified that while Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, his candidate is not advocating that it be changed for the current retired generation - only people still working.

So, the question is this. If Perry will pay current retirees while getting those currently working to start "investing" in something akin to 401(k) plans, how is he going to pay for this?

Social Security for current retirees depends on payments from current working folks. That's one "tax" for retirement on the working folks.

A plan that funds someone's retirement for their old age depends on investment from current working folks. That's another "tax" for retirement on working folks.

So, Perry's plan is to simultaneously fund the old plan and the new one by taxing working folks twice? I'm sure that will work.