Why Conservatives Hate San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi (it has nothing to do with communism and everything to do with the disruption of markets)

Republicans really hate Nancy Pelosi. Last week, in the midst of a pandemic taking 1,000 lives a day and a reminder that we still have 11 million newly unemployed people, the most popular story on Facebook was about Nancy Pelosi's haircut. On a related note, I've seen a number of Trump fans holler about how a vote for Biden will be a vote for socialism or communism, some of it explicitly tying this charge back to Pelosi who - in their eyes - apparently is a socialist or represents a socialist part of the country.

Nancy Pelosi -Democrat - is the Speaker of the House. Mitch McConnell - Republican - is the Senate Majority Leader. There are 535 members of Congress but these two easily have the most influence on legislation. By comparing the regions that elected them as representatives, you can learn a lot about who Republicans and Democrats are.

Kentucky is the 2nd most dependent state in the union, taking in far more money than it pays in taxes. California is 41st on that list.

Kentucky had 39 startups attract $743 million in venture capital in 2018. San Francisco had 1,127 startups attract $24 billion in venture capital, 30X the number of startups and venture capital in spite of the fact that San Francisco's population is only 20% that of Kentucky's. No Republican has explained why venture capitalists are so enamored of the communists in San Francisco but so avoidant of the capitalists in Kentucky.

Average income in San Francisco and % of folks with a BA are both 2.4X higher than in Kentucky. In Pelosi's San Francisco, households make nearly $100,000 more than those in Kentucky. In January, the unemployment rate in Kentucky was twice as high as it was in San Francisco.

The Republican - Democratic divide along with income is not limited to Kentucky and San Francisco. Of the 8 states with the highest per capita income, Biden is strongly favored to win all 8 (per fivethirtyeight's forecast 6 Sep). Of the 8 states with the lowest per capita income, Biden is favored to win only one. This November, the other 34 states will be deciding whether to follow the lead of the communities that host Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Harvard and MIT or to follow the lead of rural Mississippi, Alabama and Kentucky.

How do politicians like Mitch McConnell manage to convince so many folks that the socialists are in San Francisco and the true capitalists are in Kentucky, a state that manages to attract lots of government subsidies but very little venture capital? In other words, a region highly dependent on the government but not capital markets?

Maybe it is because markets are disruptive and the real issue for Republicans is a preference for tradition over the disruption of change. The whaling industry was made obsolete by oil wells. Oil wells are being made obsolete by solar panels. Progress has little respect for tradition and for conservatives, tradition is more important than markets.

William F. Buckley was the right's favorite intellectual for decades. His most telling quote was, "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'"

The Bay Area is not communist. It does, however, represent a threat to tradition. It continually tries new things with less regard for tradition than perhaps any other region of the world. Now California governor Gavin Newsom was the first elected official in the country to grant same-sex wedding licenses when mayor of San Francisco. Dee Hock - former founding CEO of VISA - helped to invent the modern credit card in San Francisco. Genentech was founded there, the first company to dare turn genetic code into intellectual property, starting the biotech industry which threatens to change humanity at a its most basic level: our DNA. For many conservatives, this sort of entrepreneurship, innovation and social invention is more threatening than any socialists. And yet it is the natural culmination of market economies, the very opposite of communism.

Acting on Forecasts Rather than Proof

The forecasts for COVID-19 deaths are falling. That's wonderful news. It turns out that measuring the cost for exponential growth of a virus has something in common with measuring the value of startups. It is subject to error but can still inform you how to act.

One key lesson is to move first and move fast. By the time you have data proving the value of a startup, you pay far more for it. Similarly, by the time you have data proving the severity of a virus, you pay far more for it.

Number of deaths thru 11-Apr:
San Francisco: 14
New York: 6,898

"[San Francisco mayor London] Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy effective on March 17, at a point when San Francisco had fewer than 50 confirmed coronavirus cases. (California Governor Gavin Newsom followed with a similar statewide order 19 March.) On that date, New York City already had more than 2,000 positive cases. But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, reluctant either to shutter schools or issue a stay-at-home directive for the nation’s largest city, didn’t take similar action for several days. By the time New York City fully shut down on March 22, more than 10,000 cases were reported across its five boroughs." [From the Atlantic, "The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve"]

5 days can make a big difference when facing a virus that spreads or contracts exponentially.

I see people wondering how stock prices can go up when we're still in a pandemic. Stock prices represent an attempt to price an endless stream of future profits. It is true that the Dow is up 30% in the last couple of weeks. It is also true that it is still down 25% from its peak a couple of months ago. Stock prices fluctuate because people are trying to estimate something in the future that is continually changing as events and best estimate methodologies change. Investors still agree that the coronavirus and measures to protect against it have lowered the value of future profits; their margin of error in estimating that means that stock prices are going to fluctuate. A lot.

I see people dismissing the models forecasting coronavirus deaths as being wrong. Models are always wrong but that doesn't mean that they aren't helpful. One catch-22 with models and policy is that the group taken least seriously could be proven most accurate. What do I mean? Let's say that we had ignored the coronavirus warnings from experts and continued as normal - never socially distancing and not changing anything. In that scenario, New York would be a best case for cities and fatalities would be multiples of what they are now. We could easily have 1 million deaths rather than 100,000. The best-case forecasts would now seem tragically naive. On the flip side, if we listened to those who warned of the worst and took serious measures to protect against that, moving fast and dramatically, the worst-case forecasts would now seem morbidly pessimistic. We would have far less than 100,000 dead and would never come close to a million. Even without behavior change, forecasts of anything that grows or contracts exponentially are likely to be off. Hugely. The outcome could easily be 10X or 1,000X better or worse given just small changes in the rate of contagion or mortality.

Early investors in Apple likely never once stopped to think that it could be worth a trillion early the next century. But they didn't have to know it would be worth that much to know it was a good investment. Given the Bay Area is the epicenter for trying to value the future, it is unsurprising that it would become a model for how to minimize the harm of a virus. Among the many things the folks in the Bay Area have learned is that it is better to move first to pursue a possibility - whether that possibility is avoiding fatalities from a pandemic or owning shares of a startup that later make you rich - and then learn from and adapt to reality than it is to wait for the data to come in and by then to have missed your opportunity.

As the future comes at us with increasing speed, the ability to quickly assess what models suggest rather than what data confirms could make all the difference.

What if the Senate is Obsolete?

As economic power and population shifted from rural farms to industrializing cities in decades around 1900, Britain and Germany changed how their parliaments were defined. US legislature hasn't made that shift in representation and probably should. This is going to be contentious.

As Britain pioneered the industrial revolution, Manchester's population exploded. A center for industrialization, Manchester grew to become the UK's third largest city (after London and Glasgow) by 1901. Between 1700 and 1800 it grew from fewer than 10,000 to about 90,000.  Manchester's population doubled between 1801 and 1820 and then doubled again by 1850.

Yet when it began its growth, Parliamentary representation was granted to districts. Manchester did not even elect its own Members of Parliament (MPs) in the early 19th century. It was just part of the Lancashire district.

Meanwhile, in "rotten boroughs," a paltry few could elect two MPs. How few? In one borough, 7 voters got to elect 2 MPs. Dunwich had literally fallen into the sea, leaving just 32 voters clinging to land; they, too, got to elect 2 MPs. In a sense, this was representation by acreage.

The economy changed how population and power was distributed. Industrialization brought workers into cities like Manchester and left behind smaller populations in the little rural communities that - in part thanks to industrialization - needed fewer people to raise crops and tend livestock. While the population and economies of cities grew, their political representation had not.

This changed in the UK (the disparity between Dunwich and Manchester began to be addressed with legislation in 1832) and, later, in Germany, Austria and France through a series of parliamentary reforms starting in the early 1800s and continuing through the first world war. As the economy shifted from agriculture to industrial, as the important factor shifted from land to capital, these communities shifted political power to give voice to the members of this new economy.

The need for such a shift in the US is less dramatic. At least in the House. Divided into 435 districts by population (obviously a number that grows every decade), the US is not going to have anything as egregious as 7 people electing two representatives.

Nonetheless, the Senate is still structured around the notion that acreage deserves representation. Like the early forms of British parliament that found themselves antiquated by urbanization and industrialization, the US Senate gives disproportionate representation to owners of land rather than capital or knowledge. Two states, Wyoming and Vermont, have populations smaller than Washington DC. Those states have four senators and DC has none. 21 states with a population of 36 million get 42 senators; California with a population of 39 million gets 2 senators. In one part of the country, you are just one of 850,000 voices your senator must represent; in another, you are one of 19.7 million voices

California has helped to pioneer the information and entrepreneurial economies and that has made it successful in industries like aerospace, communications, silicon, software, biotech, and the internet. Of the 100 most valuable companies in the world earlier this year, the market cap of companies in California represented $4.2 trillion of the US's $14.1 trillion (and of the world's $21.2 trillion). California represents 12.4% of the American population and 30% of the value of the country's biggest companies. Like Manchester in the early 19th century, California's lead in creating jobs and wealth has not yet translated into commensurate representation.

In 1790, when the US was founded, 90% of workers were in agriculture. Acreage was a pretty good proxy for good representation at that time. Agriculture now employs fewer than 2% of American workers. Acreage is now a terrible approximation of how representation should be calculated. (And yes, I know that technically the Senate is a way to represent states not acreage but it does effectively do that. State representation does not follow people around as they move; states "govern" over a constant and stable area, not a constant and stable population. What this effectively means is that Senators represent acreage.)

As it now stands, the politics in the US is going to be disproportionately defined by the least populous and least affluent areas of the country because of how the Senate is structured. It's hard to imagine us ignoring that for too much longer or imagine that addressing this issue will ever be easy.

California vs. West Virginia: A Question About Which Direction the Country is Heading

Even some of my California friends had posted things like, "If you subtract California from the national vote, Trump won the popular vote." My counter to this is, "If you subtract the former confederacy from the national vote, Clinton won by 6.5 million votes."

Apparently there are folks threatening to boycott California because the state is out of sync with Trump nation. Such sentiments inspired this tweet:

Trump won by his biggest margin in West Virginia, by 42.2%. Clinton won by her biggest margin in California, by 30.4%. Let's compare those states and consider what it means to dismiss California as a place that is out of touch with the rest of the country.

California ranks third for median household income.

West Virginia ranks 49th.

California is the most populous state in the union. In 1950 it had 10.7 million and now it has about 40 million, nearly 4X as many. The simple fact that California has grown so rapidly is testament to its ability to create jobs.

West Virginia had 2 million people in 1950. Today it has 1.8 million, a drop of 10%. West Virginia has not been able to create jobs or even a net gain in population.

If you believe that people just are who people are, you might think that it makes sense that West Virginia would register a protest vote against the status quo. It's had trouble in this new economy and of course those poor people will vote for change. But if you believe that people are who their institutions are - if you believe that we're defined by our culture, schools, media, government, policies, and prevailing norms - then it is a terrible thing to follow the lead of a place like West Virginia. Why? Because the policies and norms it has chosen has made its people less able to thrive in the modern economy. History shows us that it's not how hard people work or who they are genetically that determines how prosperous they are. It is, instead, the systems they work with and within. Incomes were 6 to 8X higher in 2000 than they were in 1900 in spite of the average workweek dropping from 60 hours to 40. Incomes weren't higher because people were "better." They were higher because people learned, worked in, and were able to use better systems. If you believe that people can't change, than West Virginia was right to vote for different policies and leaders than California; if you believe that people can change and there is no intrinsic reason that West Virginia can't be as prosperous as California than it's a terrible thing that the nation is now going to follow after policies West Virginia voters think sound great rather than the ones that Californian voters think would be great. West Virginia's thinking doesn't make its people as prosperous as California's.

Here are just a few fundamental issues that Californians would find alarming in Trump's policies that apparently comfort West Virginians: immigration, free trade, and free religion.

California has the largest share of foreign-
born people, West Virginia the lowest. 

Trump wants to limit immigration, both legal and illegal. California is a land of immigrants. About 40% of Silicon Valley startups have at least one foreign founder. On a personal note, I was working with a startup on Google's campus this year and one of the departments (robotic sensors) had five people from five countries: the US, Iran, Italy, Poland, and South Korea. It's a global economy and California doesn't just sell to customers from all over the world, it hires and partners with people from all over the world.

Trump has chastised Apple for manufacturing its iPhone in China. He doesn't really like free trade and has threatened to levy a 35% tariff against Mexico and a 45% tariff against China. This could easily start a trade war. (Does anyone believe that other countries will merely pay huge tariffs and allow the US to continue to sell into their markets without levying an offsetting tariff? How naive do you have to be to believe that?) But it also misses the point. 75% of iPhones are sold outside of the US. Apple is headquartered in the US but it is an international company with an international product, customers, suppliers and partners. This is true of most of the products coming out of Silicon Valley, from Intel's chips to Uber's app.

Finally, Trump wants to limit the immigration of Muslims. This is a special kind of exclusion that is not only anti-constitutional (read the first amendment to be reminded that Congress shall pass no law regarding religion) but shows a complete confusion about where creativity comes from. Trump knows which religion is right and which is not. Really creative people don't even know which process is best or which theory will hold up for a century or will be dis-proven tomorrow. Freedom of thought - freedom to question or challenge established "truths" is fundamental to creativity. It's no accident that the free speech movement began in Berkeley just as the computer revolution was beginning. Freedom of religion is elementary compared to the freedom of thought needed to create new scientific theories, new social paradigms, new technologies, new businesses and new business models.

California has given birth to blue jeans, the Hollywood that generates TV shows and blockbuster movies, and a music industry that gave us acts like the Grateful Dead and the Eagles. It's been the source of so many cultural and business trends.  The most defining "industry" in California is Silicon Valley, a place that gave us Apple, Facebook, Intel, HP, Twitter, the internet, and venture capitalism. The most defining business in West Virginia is coal mining.

To this day we revere the ancient Greeks yet their golden age was only a century or two. Socrates died in 399 BC and Aristotle died in 322 BC. It was during the century or so around their lives that so much of what we know of their inventions - from philosophy to math to theater and democracy - emerged. It was an incredible time that the Greeks experienced only for awhile even though the world has felt its impact for the thousands of years since.

If this move towards West Virginia and away from California proves defining of the country's future, the US will go the way of other great and defining communities in history. We will have had our time and so much of what has come out of the US in the last century in particular is likely to continue to define the world in the way that the Athens of 4th century BC continues to define the world to this day. Civilization continues to carry forward the great inventions like money and democracy, even if it fumbles and drops them from time to time. It builds on what came before. Evolution - biological and social - doesn't throw away so much as build on. In that sense, the US of the 20th century will likely be with civilization for millennia to come. What isn't certain, though, is whether it will - like modern Greece - become just another also-ran as some other community becomes the innovators who we all follow with some odd mix of envy, reluctance, and excited mimicry.

For now, swing voters in the US have decided to follow the lead of a state that hasn't invented a new industry since coal mining in the 1740s rather than a state that is even now incubating industries as different as self-driving cars and genetic engineering. It's chosen to try going back to an earlier time when jobs were being created for coal miners rather than for entrepreneurs. If Trump is successful at creating such jobs it means that we'll be going in the direction of the 1700s rather than the late 2100s. That should be a sobering thought.

California Cuts Back on Investments in the Future

Pat Brown - current governor Jerry Brown's dad - was governor of California from 1959 to 1967. In 1960, he made California the first state in the nation with a college system designed for all high school graduates. The University of California (UC) system that included Berkeley and UCLA was designed for the top 25% of high school graduates. The State system that included San Diego State University and Fresno State was designed for the top 50%. The community college system was designed for all high school graduates. At the time, it was an incredibly visionary - seemingly excessive - investment in the future.

I'm not alone in believing that it is no coincidence that California is the state that later became home to two of the great advances in human history: Silicon Valley and Bio-tech. But there was real lag between Pat Brown laying the foundation in 1960 and the founding of Apple and Genentech in 1976, much less the tech boom of the 1990s.

All that to say that it's worth paying attention to the fact that the golden state is now cutting back on its investments in education. Not only is it becoming more expensive for college students but even in K-12, the state is failing to invest. California has the worst pupil-to-student ratio in the country.

It's hard to imagine this is going to mean anything good for the state in 2030. Jerry Brown has helped to balance California's budget, showing himself a more able accountant than Arnold. Now we can hope that he shows himself to be as savvy an investor as his dad and reverses California's fall into educational mediocrity.

California Mortgage Market Has a Bad Hair Day (or, how to make a billion dollars a day)

As of 2000, a Californian who wanted to sell home loans could get a license without taking a single class. By contrast, to become a professional barber he or she would need 1,500 hours to qualify for a state license.

From this simple contrast, we can conclude which of the following?

1. Californians better understand the consequences of a bad haircut than they do a bad home loan.
2. Financial market deregulation became confused with financial market anarchy just before the bust.
3. Appearances are everything.

Oh, wonder why jobs still aren't coming back into the construction industry? It is possible that the market got a tad over-built as a result of sub-prime mortgages. Between 2000 and 2005, the volume of sub prime loans quadrupled. Not only did house prices rise, but so did the amount borrowed against them and the number of houses built.

One hedge fund manager who bet against this bubble began to make one billion a day in 2007 when the sub prime market began to unwind. Now, four years later, the construction industry still has not recovered.

Financial markets are competitive, and that's good. But like sports, even competition - especially competition - suggests the need for rules. Just think how much better off we'd be if we took finance as seriously as sports and properly made and enforced rules to keep play fair. Or even if we took finance as seriously as haircuts.

Facts taken from Sebastian Mallaby's More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, pp. 323-331.

Double Dip Recession - Courtesy of California

This recession has one more dip in it before it’s over. The problem doesn’t stem from Obama’s stimulus package: California’s fiscal woes will be the cause.

If California were a country, its economy would be ranked 8th in the world – smaller than France and Italy and larger than Spain and Canada. All of the ten largest economies in the world have adopted aggressive stimulus policies. All, that is, but California. This is going to undermine Obama’s efforts to stimulate the economy.

Californians recently voted against taxing themselves more and will now start slashing programs. For instance, professors within the state university system will be put on furlough and lose about 10% of their income. Layoffs, program cuts, and discontinuation of services will hit every community. These, just as the economic numbers for the US are looking better.

California’s contraction won’t be enough to completely de-rail the recovery. It will, however, delay it by one or two quarters.

Governor Schwarzenegger now finds himself in the same position as Gray Davis – the governor he replaced in a recall election. The problem wasn’t Davis or Schwarzenegger. California is the only state to require a two-thirds vote in the Legislature for BOTH tax increases and budget approval. A small minority can hold the legislature hostage and the odds of finding agreement among 66.6% of the diverse population of Californians on anything – much less tax and budget – are close to 0.6%. Until this system is changed, California’s problems will continue and the requirement for balanced budget means that the state government will always exacerbate down turns and bubbles alike.

California’s budget problems are about to spill over into the rest of the nation. Expect the economic numbers to fall again in the Fall. And look for the cause in California.

As the World Spins

The Republicans are expressing outrage at Obama's deficits. This is like the runner up in a fart contest calling the winner gross. If they're truly outraged at big deficits they ought to finally give up their worship of Reagan and defense of Bush2.

Some Catholics attacked Obama and Notre Dame because they didn't think that one of the nation's leading universities should invite the president to speak (because he's pro-choice). Those Catholics should be reminded that the protestants, deists, closet agnostics, and general collection of anti-papists who founded this country reluctantly let them in because they were worried that once safely here, the Catholics would try to subordinate our laws to the whims of the pope.

Tomorrow Californians will likely vote down provisions to fund their state government. Californians are so angry that even our local public radio station in San Diego has begun to sound like right-wing talk radio. They don't even deny that needy constituents will lose out without more taxes (e.g., the mentally ill), but insist that the only way to get politicians to stop wasting money on (trivial) appointments for each other is to deny the government money. How brilliant. Anyone who looks across the border at Mexico where tax rates are only 18.5% can see that the best way to reduce corruption and abuse in government is to cut taxes, budgets, and the ability of the government to actually govern.

Lest you think that I'm a mindless Obama defender, I'll say that his policy for education suggests a history of paste-eating. He is spending $100 billion to "fix" the 5,000 worst schools in the nation by firing all the adults in those schools and starting over. There is nothing in his (and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan's) policy that suggests that he realizes that the 5,000 worst schools are just as much a product of the educational system as the 5,000 best. To act otherwise is to de-moralize millions of professionals, create chaos, and miss the opportunity to actually make systemic change. If Obama's plan worked, education would have already been "transformed" by the half dozen previous presidents. The only thing unique about his approach is the magnitude of the budget he'll waste.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been rebuked for calling the swine flu a pandemic. Apparently casual users of the term have something other than three nights in bed with a fever when they think of a pandemic.

Republicans are now claiming that Pelosi knew about torture back in 2003. This would have been remarkable. In 2003, even Bush and Cheney were unaware of torture. Or so they told us. So if Pelosi knew about it, she'd have been unique. This is sort of like the devolution of their protests against climate change.
1. We aren't torturing.
2. I mean, we are torturing but it is not authorized and was just the act of a few mavericks.
3. Okay, we authorized it but it worked.
4. Ha! Nancy Pelosi never once said a word of protest and she knew! We might have done something immoral and ineffectual but Pelosi didn't stop us.

Gay Marriage in California

California's Supreme Court today struck down state law's same-sex marriage ban, finding the state's constitution "properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples."

There might be no better articulation of why this makes sense than this bit from San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders. Sanders is a conservative who had vowed to veto a city council resolution allowing gay marriage. He changed his mind and very poignantly and clearly explains why. I, for one, can think of nothing more to add.

California - Land of Children?

George F. Kennan was one of the most influential policy-makers during the peak of America's influence. A remarkably thoughtful man who warned against involvement in Vietnam – in the 1950s – and warned against warming up to the USSR – in the 1940s. Back in 1989, the Atlantic published excerpts from his diary, including these two on California.

Just visiting here, Kennan had keen insights into California. Here in San Diego, evacuation centers have been characterized by live bands, roving clowns, and what participants and observers describe as harmony. At one point, there was one volunteer for every one evacuee down at Qualcomm. (Where else but California would the numbers work out to allow one personal trainer for each disaster victim?) For those of you living in other parts of the country, Kennan’s diary entries from 1951 and 1956 might help you to better understand this odd creature called a Californian. As the father of fifth generation Californians, I'm a little ashamed to say that his words are very much on the mark.

From Kennan's diary:

California again, this time for research at the Hoover Library in Palo Alto.
MAY 13, 1956

California reminds me of the popular American Protestant concept of heaven: there is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many—not all—of one's friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating one another about the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable; and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realize that now, the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant, nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again.

California is outwardly one-dimensional, in the emotional sense. Looking at the faces, listening to the snatches of conversation, one wonders whether such a thing as anguish exists at all—whether, in fact, there is even any anguish in love, or whether this, too, comes, is experienced, passes, and dies with the same cheerful casualness that seems to dominate all the other phenomena of existence.

These people practice what for centuries the philosophers have preached: they ask no questions; they, live, seemingly, for the day; they waste no energy or substance on the effort to understand life; they enjoy the physical experience of living; they enjoy the lighter forms of contact with an extremely indulgent and undemanding natural environment; their consciences are not troubled by the rumblings of what transpires beyond their horizon. If they are wise, surely the rest of us are fools.


NOVEMBER 4, 1951
PASADENA

I have today that rarest of luxuries: a day of complete leisure, with no obligations, away from home, where not even family or house or neglected grounds can lay claim to attention. I am out here for three days on business and am the guest of a friend whose home, swaddled in gardens, looks down from a hill on the rooftops and foliage of Pasadena. It is strange, and somewhat enervating, after watching the death of the year in the growing austerity of the East Coast autumn, to sit now in a garden, to listen to the chirping of birds and the tinkling of a fountain, to watch the foliage of the eucalyptus trees stirring in a summer breeze, and to feel the warm sunshine on the back of one's neck.

My thoughts are full of this southern California world I see below me and about me. It is easy to ridicule this world, as Aldous Huxley and so many other intellectuals have done—but it is silly, and a form of self-condemnation, to do so. These are ordinary human beings: several million of them. The things that brought them here, and hold them here, are deeply human phenomena—as are the stirrings of anxiety that cause them to be so boastful and defensive about it. Being human phenomena, they are part of ourselves; and when we purport to laugh at them, as though we stood fully outside them, it is we who are the ridiculous ones.

I feel great anxiety for these people, because I do not think they know what they are in for. In its mortal dependence on two liquids—oil and water—that no individual can easily produce by his own energy (even together with family and friends), the life of this area only shares the fragile quality of all life in the great urban concentrations of the motor age. But here the lifelines of supply seem to me particularly tenuous and vital. That is especially true of water, which they now have to bring from hundreds of miles—and will soon have to bring from much farther away. But equally disturbing to me is the utter dependence on the costly, uneconomical gadget called the automobile for practically every process of life from birth through shopping, education, work, and recreation, even courtship, to the final function of burial. In this community, where the revolutionary force of motorization has made a clean sweep of all other patterns of living and has overcome all competition, man has acquired a new form of legs. And what disturbs me is not only that these mechanical legs have a deleterious effect on man himself, drugging him into a sort of paralysis of the faculty of reflection and distorting his emotional makeup while they are in use—these things are not too serious, and perhaps there are even ways of combating them. What disturbs me most is man's abject dependence on this means of transportation and on the complicated processes that make it possible. It is as though his natural legs had really become shriveled by disuse. One has the feeling that if his artificial ones were taken away from him, he would go crawling miserably and helplessly around like a crippled insect, no longer capable of conducting the battle for existence, doomed to early starvation, thirst, and extinction.
One must not exaggerate this sort of thing. All modern urban society is artificial in the physical sense: dependent on gadgets, fragile and vulnerable. This is simply the apotheosis. Here the helplessness is greatest, but also the thoughtlessness. And the thoughtlessness is part of the helplessness.

But alongside the feeling of anxiety I have at the sight of these people, there is a questioning as to the effect they are going to have on, and the contribution they are going to make to, American society as a whole. Again, this is not conceived in terms of reproach or criticism. There is really a subtle but profound difference between people here and what Americans used to be, and still partly are, in other parts of the country. I am at a loss to define this difference, and am sure that I understand it very imperfectly.

Let me try to get at it by overstating it. Here it is easy to see that when man is given (as he can be given only for relatively brief periods and in exceptional circumstances) freedom both from political restraint and from want, the effect is to render him childlike in many respects: fun-loving, quick to laughter and enthusiasm, unanalytical, unintellectual, outwardly expansive, preoccupied with physical beauty and prowess, given to sudden and unthinking seizures of aggressiveness, driven constantly to protect his status in the group by an eager conformism—yet not unhappy. In this sense southern California, together with all that tendency of American life which it typifies, is childhood without the promise of maturity—with the promise only of a continual widening and growing impressiveness of the childhood world. And when the day of reckoning and hardship comes, and I think it must, it will be—as everywhere among children—the cruelest and most ruthless natures who will seek to protect their interests by enslaving the others; and the others, being only children, will be easily enslaved. In this way, values will suddenly prove to have been lost that were forged slowly and laboriously in the more rugged experience of Western political development elsewhere.

My Roots in the Redwoods

I love the redwoods. My great grandfather settled up in the redwoods in Northern California more than a century ago. I was born in that area and then, after graduating from high school in San Diego, found myself wanting to live amongst the redwoods again - but without giving up on the beach culture. I landed at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).

I still miss the UCSC campus. It sits on a hill over the Pacific - the northern part of Monterey Bay. The campus has 22 distinct ecosystems - from the Oak trees and grassy hills you usually find around Sacramento to the thick copses of trees. When I went there I think we had about 6,000 students on more than 2,000 acres. The walks between classes could entail a walk through the woods, buildings disappearing behind trees. One quarter, I had a twenty minute walk between classes with only a fifteen minute window. I might pass by deer, would pass through various copses of woods that blocked all roads and buildings, and then get a glimpse of the ocean below on one section of the trail. I was always late for my next class yet never felt stressed. I loved jogging through the fire trails, even though the continual climbing never let me move very fast. A few years ago, I brought my family to campus and again found myself transfixed by its beauty. My wife turned to me and said, "Tell me again why we don't quit work and go to school here for a few years?" We passed by one guy who looked like the kind of fellow who might never have seen beauty in anything that didn't wiggle when she walked, and I heard him say to another student, "I'm going to tell my kids that I went to the most beautiful, f***ing school in the world." I almost stopped to say, "Well, you won't put it quit like that but, yeah."

With all that said, here are two videos that brought back memories. The first is a slow moving trip through the redwoods at Orick, CA, where my great grandpa settled and my father grew up. In fact, Davison Ranch is now a part of the Redwood National Forest. It's gorgeous country, where the residents pay for the beauty by living in a fairly isolated rain forest. (It's more than 13 hours of driving to get from the part of California where my dad grew up to the part of California where my son has grown up; Santa Cruz is about halfway between those two points.) The second video is from a Kenny Loggins concert filmed on campus at UC Santa Cruz. You get some sense of what the campus is like as the video shoots the band and audience from different angles. Enjoy your trip into the redwoods.

My California Whine - Live Earth Excludes Us

In between laundry, a trip to the beach, and various other things, I've been watching Live Earth today. A music nerd, it was fun to learn about a variety of artists I hadn't heard before. But I have a complaint.

For one thing, the United States had two concerts - both on the East Coast. Second, artists who've been activists for decades, artists who've led the charge on issues like alternative energy, were excluded.

My kids are fifth generation Californians, so I know that I suffer from myopia, but I can't think of a state that has been a bigger stage for the development and emergence of pop rock in the last forty years. The Grateful Dead and the Eagles, Jefferson Airplane and Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Little Feat, and Bonnie Raitt are just some of the artists who came to or from California and became music stars. And all have been activists in environmental causes. Even our Republican governor has signed off on environmentally progressive legislation.

I know that Bob Dylan & the Band, the Beatles, & the Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen have done more to define modern pop rock than the above-named groups, but California is still a place of enormous importance for both the environmental movement and the music scene. Certainly more so than D.C. (one concert location today) and New York (another). If D.C. is a music center, than San Diego is a ski resort. California is not just the biggest exporter of agriculture in the U.S. - it is the biggest exporter of pop culture. LA movie and music studios produce a staggering percentage of the world's movies and music. And California has consistently led the U.S. in environmental regulation.

So why would California be ignored as a venue and a source for performers? Probably because the event was organized by Al Gore. American politicians have learned to ignore California; in the last 20 years, Republican presidential candidates have come to believe that they can't win the state and Democratic presidential candidates have come to believe that they can't lose it. The result? The most populous and richest and creative state in the U.S. - the sixth largest economy in the world - is once again ignored.

The Bay Area and the Reinvention of Self

I'm on business travel this week, here in Silicon Valley with a client. I grew up close to the Bay Area and lived in Santa Cruz for awhile. I met my wife (a Canadian on vacation at the time) in Los Gatos and our first date consisted of me trying to find the waterfront in San Francisco (to this day I remain directionally challenged).

In my mind, there is a relationship between the beginnings of the free speech movement at Berkeley and the hippies in Haight Ashbury during the 1960s and the Esalen Institute and EST seminars through the 1970s and 1980s and the tech boom here in Silicon Valley in the 1990s.

I don't know if there is another place on the planet where people are so full of possibility - whether it be the possibility of reinventing themselves by a change in thinking ("excuse me while I slip into a more comfortable paradigm") or body ("I'm feeling bored, Barbara. I think I'll ran an ultramarathon this weekend out to Yosemite."), or starting a business with which they expect to change the world and become rich.

Of course, what else would one expect from a state that was largely defined by a Doctor Marsh in LA who was not actually a doctor and a Captain Sutter in Sacramento who was not actually a Captain? Americans who reach the end of the continent have no where left to go but where their imaginations will take them. California is the land of invention - technological, social, and personal.