Top 9 Reasons That I'm Glad It's Baseball Season

9. Baseball is not a violent sport. The pitcher tries to throw the ball past the batter, not at him.

8. Baseball seems to me such a civilized game, played at a conversational speed that encourages discussions and friendships among the fans.

7. Baseball is a humbling sport. Even the best teams lose about 60 games a season. Even the best hitters are put out two-thirds of the time. Players tend to be a little more philosophical about pacing themselves through a season of 162+ games.

6. Baseball has a tradition that allows fans to compare numbers over the course of a century - that’s tradition.

5. The numbers that get compared are so fuzzy (it wasn’t until 1950 that whites had to compete with blacks, baseball fields vary greatly in the ease with which they accommodate home runs, of late players were probably “juicing,” etc.) that comparisons between players inevitably provokes great arguments (see point 8).

4. Baseball is played outdoor in the late spring and summer. If it rains, everyone comes back later to play and watch the game. In this sense, baseball comes with a good weather guarantee.

3. Baseball is scalable. Kids who are 12 can play an engaging game as can college kids who are 20 and professionals who are 30. As long as the players are roughly matched in ability, the game promises to be interesting.

2. Baseball lets the fans feel superior. Batting champs strike out, Cy Young Award winners give up home runs. They make grown men wear those funny little uniforms. A guy making $30,000 a year can holler at a guy making $3 million.

1. There is almost no correlation between athleticism and the ability to hit a 95 mph curveball. There is no classic hitter’s physique, giving the sport an everyman look in spite of the fact that only about .0003% of the population can consistently hit a 95 mph curveball. Lean, chubby, and muscular players, Japanese or Latino guys who speak little or no English, black guys or white guys who talk too much, serious guys and silly guys – the great players seem to defy any stereotype of personality, intellect, or physical characteristics.

Today I Hate Google

I'm intrigued to see the words and phrases people use to find R World. I found it flattering and oddly disorientating weeks ago when I was in the top five for searches on "reasons to pull out of Iraq." It felt good to be there between the BBC and MSNBC on such a search and while I found it confusing that a blog getting about 2 readers per week would rank up there with the 2 thousand per nanosecond sites like the BBC, it was a happy confusion. I've shown up at or near the top of the search lists for other curiously esoteric phrases that include mention of such oddities as western civilization, social evolution, or economic goods. I've generally found the search results that result in a hit on R World more curious than offensive. That is, until today.

Today, some poor soul enters the following into google:
98.9% of what i do is motivated by spite and porn
Number one on the search results? R World. Sigh.

Today, I hate google.

Are Your Blog Reading Habits Making You Go Blind?

In order to sell papers or keep you tuned in until 11 PM, the news has to sound dire. "Is Your Dinner Salad Actually Killing You?" "Will Subprime Loans Take Down the Economy?" "Are Your Blog Reading Habits Making You Go Blind?"

This may yet prove to be one of the more pernicious legacies of "grab your eyes" journalism.

Let's look at the facts about the time we live in. Never has a generation had the promise of greater longevity (and some even think that our mere 80 years is just the beginning of an explosion in life expectancy). Bio tech has made the problems of disease and aging problems of programming, of engineering. Every day, tens of thousands more knowledge workers are joining the work force - ready and able to begin solving the myriad problems that progress brings with it. The global economy continues to grow, lifting more people out of poverty. Foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are beginning to make real progress towards alleviating suffering in third world countries. Progress in computing promises the ability to create simulated environments for learning and experimentation. The problems of climate change are real but solutions to that problem are reachable. Garrison Keillor is still broadcasting, Van Morrison is still recording. Every month, more great books are printed than I even have time to read. Young people are still invigorating because their lives are filled with more possibility than even they realize and babies and toddlers are still enchanting because they are so unselfconscious and honest. Here in San Diego the weather is absolutely gorgeous - the winds and rain have made this sunny and warm day even more spectacular than it might otherwise be.

Don't let your blog reading or news consumption habits blind you to that.

Let hope seize hold of you by the lapels and shake a little joy into your senses. This is an amazing time to be alive.

[You may now return to your regular diet of gloom, doom, and prognositications of worsening conditions.]

Underwear, Peasants, and Paradigms

Underwear saved the lives of peasants in the 1700's.

Innovations in the early day of the industrial revolution made underwear and changes of clothes affordable. Prior to that, clothing that lie next to the skin fostered bacteria and infection and early death. Some time later, fashion became, er, fashionable and people began to buy clothes simply to stay current rather than because their clothes were hopelessly soiled, worn or outgrown.

It is considerably harder to change minds than clothing. Thomas Kuhn's often cited and occasionally read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions popularized the notion of paradigm. He argued that a particular worldview, or paradigm, does two things. One, it makes sense of the world by ordering data and experiences into comprehensible patterns. Two, it filters out what doesn't fit into the pattern, what doesn't support the paradigm. (At any given instance, our senses are exposed to millions of bits of data; our consciousness can process only about 40 bits per second.) Thus, the paradigm we need to make sense of reality also filters out reality. One of the first jobs of a paradigm is to defend itself from attack.

Kuhn points to various examples of paradigm filters throughout history. Scientists expecting planetary orbits to be perfectly circular threw out data that deviated from that, seeing it as an error or anomaly. Their failure to clearly see the data meant that they missed the elliptical nature of orbits which meant that they missed the opportunity to develop a theory of gravity. The way that they made sense of the world kept them from sensing the world.

Radically new theories generally get accepted only by later generations. The Copernican Revolution actually took a century to be accepted. The germ theory was discarded by Pasteur's contemporaries and only accepted by the next generation, provoking the quip, "Science proceeds by the death of scientists."

A great deal of the progress of the 20th century came from solving problems of information. From semiotics and algorithms to the transmission and storage of information, we've made amazing progress in information technology. Yet new information does not automatically create a new paradigm.

There is a difference between information that streams in to be sorted and filtered to support our existing paradigms and the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, or wisdom that might transform our paradigms. We've mastered the first and have, as near as I can tell, not even bothered to define the latter as a challenge worth pursuing.

I'm sure that the medieval masses didn't think any more about changing underwear than today's masses think about changing paradigms. Yet fluency with paradigms might do as much for our quality of life as information technology did for the last century or textile manufacturing did for the 18th century.

If history teaches us nothing else, it is that paradigms are like underwear; no matter how comfortable they first seem, they eventually need changing. Maybe it's time to make paradigm shifts fashionable.

The New Media

The old media was a monologue. The new media is a dialogue. It's both that simple and that messy. No longer expected to sit listening in rapt silence, we can now generate our own content and commentary.

1,000 Billionaires vs. a Billion Thousand-aires

Last week, Forbes magazine identified 946 billionaires, a record. "The net worth of the world’s 4 billion poorest souls actually dropped, to less than $35 dollars each," a stark contrast to the average net worth of $3.6 billion for the world's wealthiest 1,000. How stark is the contrast? 100 million times more. (You might want to read that again. The average net worth of the world's wealthiest 1,000 is 100 million times greater than the average net worth of the world's poorest 4 billion. If you stopped reading now, I'd understand.)

At this point, blogging traditions suggest that I rail against the rich. I have other intentions: I plan to rail against their children.

As I get older (something that happened again this morning), I have more admiration for entrepreneurs brave enough to risk starting a business and who are clear headed enough to succeed. More than 90% of the American work force works as an employee; the days of independent businessmen are largely gone. We work for these entrepreneurs and our ability to pay the rent literally depends on their business acumen. The fact that such people have a shot at wealth strikes me as perfectly just. Their success means jobs for us and tax monies for roads and schools and more cool stuff to buy. Unlike most Americans, I neither resent their wealth nor expect to join them.

But what has this to do with their children?

We’re eager to wean families of welfare. Reliance on easy money breeds sloth and bad habits. We should be as eager to wean families of inheritances. It, too, breeds a propensity for parties, a disdain for work, and a sense of detachment from the struggles of everyday working men and women. It makes little sense to me that a working, single mother would pay a higher percentage of taxes than Paris Hilton. Wait. Let me restate that. It makes no sense to me. Estate values over, say, $3 to 5 million should be taxed at a minimum of 50%.

Beyond the benefit of sloth reduction, such a tax policy could address an odd relic from the age of capital. In this country, returns to labor are taxed at a higher rate and more consistently than are returns to capital. Warren Buffet has pointed out how his dividend income is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary’s income; this doesn’t strike him as fair. He doesn’t even mention something that strikes me as worse: the tax rate his children will pay on an inheritance is lower yet. (Of course, such a policy is irrelevant to Warren - he's giving away most of his money.) It would be hard to explain to a Martian why returns to income are taxed more than returns to capital which are taxed more than inheritance. If we value work, such policies seem backwards.

I don’t much resent Sam Walton’s wealth (particularly since he's dead and unable to enjoy it). I do resent his children’s. 50% of their $60-some billion could help to offset some of the government costs of providing health care to WalMart employees. If they wanted to be one of America’s top ten wealthiest, let them do what their father did: build their own business. Somehow, that just seems more American.

"What a Waste"

From two different opinion pieces in the Economist, 22 March 2007 issue.

"If only
It is not enough to say with the neocons that this [invasion and occupation of Iraq] was a good idea executed badly. Their own ideas are partly to blame. Too many people in Washington were fixated on proving an ideological point: that America's values were universal and would be digested effortlessly by people a world away. But plonking an American army in the heart of the Arab world was always a gamble. It demanded the highest seriousness and careful planning. Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld chose instead to send less than half the needed soldiers and gave no proper thought to the aftermath.
"What a waste. Most Iraqis rejoiced in the toppling of Saddam. They trooped in their millions to vote. What would Iraq be like now if America had approached its perilous, monumentally controversial undertaking with humility, honesty and courage? Thanks to the almost criminal negligence of Mr Bush's administration nobody, now, will ever know."

Within this editorial is a table that offers these statistics about Iraqi opinions.

62% of Iraqis think that things are about the same or worse than before the war. 74% don’t feel safe in their own neighborhood. 78% don’t support the coalition (read American) forces in Iraq. And 51% think it is okay to attack our troops. Finally, what do we get for all our bloodshed and money? 56% want either someone who rules for life or a theocracy.

And
"The man who will pay the biggest political price for Iraq will ultimately be Mr Bush. It is hardly surprising that liberal historians debate whether he is the worst president ever. But now conservatives are beginning to play the same game. A recent poll of hard-core conservative activists found that only 3% described themselves as George Bush Republicans, compared with 79% who regarded themselves as Ronald Reagan Republicans. But the damage will not be limited to the party leader. For years to come, the Republicans will be paying a collective price for the “stuff” that happened in Iraq."

Questioning Leadership

“Do we decide questions at all?
We decide answers no doubt, but surely the questions decide us.”
- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

“Human systems grow in the direction that they continually ask questions about.”
- Tal D. Ben-Shahar, Harvard Happiness Professor

Traditional teachers and leaders, preparing people for a defined and predictable future, ask questions for which they know the answer and then judge subsequent results.

We live in a time of such complexity that no one knows the answers in advance. Are we ready to follow a new generation of teachers and leaders who don't offer answers but, instead, focus us on questions? Are we ready to give up on this dated notion of turning to leaders for answers?

"The myth of leadership is a collusion between control freaks and people who don't want to take responsibility."
- Peter Block

Moving into the Entrepreneurial Economy

The defining figure in an agricultural economy is the farmer with a hoe.
The defining figure in an industrial economy is the factory worker helping to manufacture back hoes.
The defining figure in an information economy is the engineer who works on design plans for the back hoe.

The work of the factory work can substitute for quite a few farmers. (You can see in the above graph that farm workers were about 80-some% of the working population in 1800 and about ~3% of the working population in 1980.)

The knowledge worker, too, can replace a number of factory workers. (Think about how a newly designed robot - the product of a knowledge worker - can replace numerous factory workers.)

My own vision of a movement into an entrepreneurial economy is that the portion of the work force categorized as entrepreneur will grow as did the factory worker in the 1800s and the information (or knowledge) worker in the 1900s.

Manufacturing in the 1500s involved little alteration to raw materials: wheat was ground, wool was spun, and grapes crushed and aged. Yet by the 1800s the processing was more sophisticated. Manufacturing assumes a mature market for raw goods - and the manufacturer uses raw goods as inputs to a process that creates more value than the mere trade of raw goods.

The information economy arose out of the complexity of the industrial economy. As machinery, products, processes, markets, and distribution became more complex, it created a demand for more sophisticated workers. Education that shared knowledge about principles in design, engineering, advertising, and sales became important in the creation of a skilled work force - the best jobs increasingly required university education. The information economy assumes a mature market for capital - and the knowledge workers use capital goods as the material to be manipulated into greater value just as the capitalists uses raw materials to be manipulated into greater value.

We now have a very mature information economy. This forms a great foundation for an entrepreneurial economy that could build on information technology. If entrepreneurship is about bringing together raw materials, capital, and labor (or, more specifically, knowledge workers), then it assumes information networks that make dynamic markets cost-effective. The information economy will be the foundation for the coming entrepreneurial economy.

One difference that will characterize the entrepreneurial economy is the role of the worker. Traditionally, a knowledge worker sold his / her skills to the corporation that transformed those efforts into value on the market in the form of goods or services. Entrepreneurs or managers were responsible for correctly orchestrating such efforts into projects and tasks that created market value; if they did well, these entrepreneurs and managers were handsomely rewarded. The entrepreneurial economy will change that arrangement. An increasing percentage of knowledge workers (a percentage that I suspect will not exceed 30 or 40% by 2050) will work as entrepreneurs themselves. By that I partly mean that they will offer their services through a dynamic market rather than a traditional salaried position. Their pay will be linked to profits from particular projects or activities. We'll have the corporate equivalent of self-organizing complexity rather than central, command and control economies.

This will drive further advances in information technology, just as the industrial revolution transformed agricultural and the information economy has transformed industry. And this change will simply be the start of a more complex change that will transform the modern corporation into something that looks more like an incubator than a bureaucracy.

This will change so many things about how we conceive of corporations today. This and related, required changes will disperse power outwards from paternalistic managers towards individual workers. It will create opportunities that don't exist today. And it will link to the driving force of progress throughout the history of Western Civilization - increased autonomy for the individual.

Mitt's Bay of Pig-Latin

From the Boston Herald
In a recent appearance before the Miami-Dade Republican Party, Romney angered Cuban- American officials and activists when he quoted dictator Fidel Castro’s traditional sign-off line “patria o muerte, venceremos” - a Communist rallying cry which is loosely translated to mean “Fatherland or death, we shall overcome.”

[end quote]

Rumor has it that Romney didn't realize that this was Castro's patented sign off for speeches. "Fatherland or death." I mean, it certainly doesn't sound like something a communist despot might say. Fascist, sure. But communist? Who would have thought it?

I'm Banned in China

Well, my writing career has reached a new milestone. I'm now banned in China. Of course, this is true of everyone who posts on blogspot, but should I ever be invited to a cocktail party, I'll conveniently leave out that little detail.

Hmm. Maybe I'll get a t-shirt printed up.

Non Sequitur - the Fashionable Language of Politics

It is time to set loose the jesters.

Today, the United States congress debated and passed a spending bill for our troops in Iraq. I can only conclude that the modern language of politics rests heavily on the non sequitur.

Republicans continue to make absurd statements like "If we don't defeat them there they will be fighting us on the streets of our towns and cities." Or, "We want to bring home the troops but not until the job is done." These Republicans have never defined what "done" looks like or offered honest measures of progress towards that definition. They don't even define "them," a vague label that may apply to Al Qaeda, Sunni militias, vengeful Shiites, or innocent civilians enraged by the behavior of occupation forces. The thought that insurgents in Baghdad will suddenly hop into cargo planes and fly across the Atlantic to invade our cities once we have stopped trying to police their civil war is so absurd as to suggest drug use. I'm sure that there is an argument for leaving troops indefinitely in Iraq, but from what I can tell no one shared that argument with House members.

The Democrats have, sadly, countered the Republican absurdities with their own. "This will end the war in Iraq," they say. And they stuffed the spending bill with so much unrelated spending that it reeks of legislative bribery. Worse, it suggests that the congress couldn't even end our misguided invasion and occupation without offering budgetary non sequiturs of their own - provisions for spinach farmers along with money for troops. The war in Iraq will not end as our troops withdraw - it is likely to intensify and may even result in slaughter that borders on genocide.

I don't know whether we're electing officials unable to follow a train of logic longer than a prepositional phrase or whether they think that we are the ones thus handicapped. In any case, I have a suggestion. A non-partisan philosopher, intellectually able and honest, should be seated on the floor of the House and be expected to hit a buzzer every time a politician makes a statement that has not been supported by facts or does not logically follow from previous statements. Either that or it is time to set jesters loose on the floor of Congress, giving these self-important politicians a fitting backdrop for spouting their non sequiturs.

In Defense of Hesitant Hillary

Various left-wing bloggers have taken a swing at Hillary and Barack for their hesitancy of late. When first asked whether she agreed with General Pace's comment that homosexuality was immoral, Hillary said "Well, I am going to leave that to others to conclude." A day or two later, Hillary finally made her own conclusion, deciding that homosexuality is not immoral.

I have to confess that I initially joined in the disgust. Hillary's candidacy reminds me at time of Al Gore's - she often seems like a candidate who does not trust her own instincts and whether she is, as the cynics suggest, consulting her poll numbers before making up her mind or simply taking her time, the hesitancy seemed to me a liability.

And then I remembered something about the man we're so eager to send back home to Texas. One of the more remarkable things about his launch of the Iraq invasion is how little discussion preceded his decision. According to Bob Woodward, George did not even consult Colin Powell - his Secretary of State, the man who led the military against Saddam in the Gulf War. He merely told Powell that we were going in.

What if Hillary is a candidate who seems to realize that the decisions of a president are serious things and ought not to be rushed into based on initial "instincts?" We certainly could have used such an approach four or five years ago.

Finding High Ground in a Flat World – 21st Century Economic Competition

I've written a great deal about making firms more entrepreneurial. What I have not mentioned is the competitive pressure that we in the developed countries will feel to do this.

Through the early 1900's, the developed countries held a competitive advantage because of industrial capacity. Today, we have an advantage because of the pairing of knowledge workers and information technology (IT) through our corporations in what we've come to call an information economy. Yet the relative productivity advantage we have is rapidly disappearing.

The industrial economy had huge barriers to entry. By contrast, the information economy does not. A few guys in a basement can launch a business that is soon worth millions - even billions. This has consequences for national policy, particularly when those guys in the basement are in the Ukraine.

Professionals in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Germany and the rest of the EU will increasingly be competing with professionals in China, India, Malaysia, and other rapidly developing countries like the Ukraine and Taiwan. Professionals making $80,000 in developed countries will have trouble competing with similarly educated and equipped professionals making $8,000.

Individual effort has never been as big a determinant of productivity as the system in which these individuals are working. A hard working trapper in the Great Lakes makes less than a hard working dry land wheat farmer in Saskatchewan. The industrious assembly line worker makes less than the industrious programmer. Changing from an agricultural to industrial or industrial to information economy always makes a bigger difference than individual effort within an old economy.

The developed nations have an opportunity to transform again - to become an entrepreneurial economy instead of an information economy. To pretend that we can continue to demand big salaries in a world of 6 billion increasingly armed with laptops and university educations borders on denial.

What will it mean to become an entrepreneurial instead of information economy? For one thing, it means that we'll rely on an increasing percentage of our work force to act like entrepreneurs instead of knowledge workers, to move from positions within bureaucracies to positions within dynamic markets. Such markets suggest a reliance on the information economy - a smooth and continual operation of markets that are communicated across networks that blend and distort the difference between Facebook and NASDAQ, between eBay and Monster.com.

For me, the prospect of the popularization of entrepreneurship is exciting for so many reasons. But beyond what it opens up as possibility for the individual, it is a practical and increasingly necessary solution to emerging economies that will easily underbid us should we continue to rely on an information economy that has outlived its advantage.

Using the Time Machine

Imagine that you have a time machine. You can instantly go backwards in time but not forward. So, you can instantly go back to, say, 1985 or last night but you have to live forward to today's date in real time.

Do you ever use it? How often? How far back do you go?

I need to know because I'm working out some design issues on my prototype right now and am trying to gauge market demand. If it turns out that there is no demand, I'll just go back in time and not build the prototype.

Orwellian Blogging

This from Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language," May, 1945.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

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This may well be the mission of blogging: cut past the obscurity of language and media to reality as we live it.

Is Objectivity on its Death Bed?

Markets aren't magical. They simply bring together supply and demand. This can be frightening in the world of media as there is demand for certain kinds of opinions that people are happy to supply. There is demand for stories about conspiracies, extraterrestrials, heroes, and villains. While I am not saying that none of these things exist, I am saying that the supply of such stories has more to do with demand than supporting data.

There is an argument that blogs are the worst offenders in the supply of "demand-for" opinions. An intriguing post by Bruno Giussani, "Medialess Culture / Cultureless Media," explores a variety of topics. One is the claim (reported, rather than made, by Giussani) that "A key phenomena is that one of the central classic notions of journalism, objectivity, is nowhere to be found on the blogs."

Has a market-driven media and the free-for-all blogs brought us into the world defined by deconstructionists - a relativistic chasm into which any voice can shout out bizarre claims and hear them echoed in the form of shared delusions and confirmed opinions? Has nuance become a foreign language? It is easy to become pessimistic about the future of informed discourse if we accept these claims, believing that the media and Internet have fragmented into self-referential opinion factories.

And yet, I remain stupidly optimistic. Why? Because along with the market for opinions, there is a market for efficacy, for what works. People who are making a difference will force a confrontation between reality and the many opinions and theories about it. Bloggers can swap opinions, but they can also challenge conventional views that have muddled our perception of reality. And in the end, reality will prevail. It always does. Eventually.

Dubya and the Space Aliens

33% of Americans believe that George W. is doing is good job.
37% of Americans believe that aliens from outer space have contacted the US government.

This may just be the new definition of poor performance: more people believe that you're communicating with extraterrestrials than believe that you're doing well.

Dick buys Duke a Yacht

In the summer of 2002, Mitchell Wade negotiated a price of exactly $140,000 for a yacht.

About that same time, Dick Cheney's office awarded Wade his first-ever federal contract for exactly $140,000.

2 weeks later, federal taxpayer money in hand, Mitchell Wade bought the yacht and gave it to his buddy, San Diego-area Representative Duke Cunningham.

Last year, Wade and Cunningham were convicted of fraud and both sentenced to jail.

San Diego-based US Attorney Carol Lam led the investigation that resulted in Cunningham's confession and jail sentence.

After last November's elections, Bush fired Lam.

Question: Was Lam fired before she could make a connection between Cheney's $140,000 contract and Cunningham's $140,000 yacht?

More here.

Time for a Populist Movement

The Rothschild brothers didn’t seem like elites when they began their career. Mayer Rothschild began his life living in a Frankfurt ghetto, forced to leave the sidewalk when even a young child ordered him to “Step aside, Jew!” But he was a successful merchant who had the vision to send four of his five sons to the most important cities in Europe.

Mayer's son Nathan Rothschild was in London when the English began their war against Napoleon. This war was incredibly expensive. Coordinating efforts with his brothers, Nathan was able to raise huge sums of money for the British government by selling war bonds throughout Europe – primarily through his brothers in Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna, and Naples. While helping to finance the British government, Nathan made the Rothschild brothers rich and famous. By the time of his death in 1836, he might have had more liquid wealth than anyone in the world. Because they helped to invent modern financial markets, the Rothschild brothers rose from the German ghetto to become elites with power enough to dictate terms to kings.

The Rothschild brothers and others like JP Morgan helped to pioneer modern financial markets. Then, in the next century, philosophers like Keynes, policy-makers like FDR, and business visionaries like Charlie Merrill and Dee Hock “democratized” financial markets, creating access to credit and investment markets for the people. Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke is supposed to manage interest rates and reserve rates so as to do what is best for the general economy and the average person – not just a few powerful bankers. Access to financial markets once reserved for the elites is now considered a right.

Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Knox were among the revolutionaries who wrested control of the church away from the elites and helped to put it into the hands of the people in the domain of religion.

Later, Louis XIV and Henry VIII help to pioneer the nation-state and then, centuries later, revolutionaries like Jefferson and Franklin wrested control away from the elites and into the hands of the people.

The swings between power held by the elites and the people seem to me inevitable. The elites pioneer and prosper. They are the social inventors who create the great institutions like church, state, and corporation. These individuals deserve fame and fortune. But once those inventions have become an integral part of the social fabric, along come revolutionaries who turn control of these inventions over from the elites to the people.

Next up for Western Civilization? Wresting control away from the CEOs, the last of the monarchs, and putting power into the hands of the investors, employees, and communities whose fate is so inexorably tied up in the actions of the corporation.

Am I a populist or an elitist? A Republican who wants the people’s interest represented by a trusted group of elites or a Democrat who wants the people to directly represent their own interests? At this point in history, I’m a populist, a Democrat ready to see the power of the powerful corporation dispersed.