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

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

"Have you noticed one thing that Socrates, the Buddha, and Jesus have in common?" I asked.
Bernard began to chortle. "No! But I do know what John the Baptist and Winnie the Pooh have in common," and then he dissolved into laughter.
"What," I groaned.
"Same middle name!" he doubled up in laughter, nearly hitting his head on the table.
I was trying to feign 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 ever noticed that Socrates, Buddha and Jesus never wrote anything?"
"No," Bernard confessed.
"At least, as far as we know. They just wandered around and taught people. And yet look at how long their teachings have lasted," I said. "Look at how much impact 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 “Add him to your list of great, unpublished teachers.”
“Wow,” I nodded. “Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammed.”

"Oh, Ron," Bernard giggled, "did you hear about Buddha's lost teachings?"
"No," I replied.
"Everyone knows that the Buddha taught that want is at the root of unhappiness," and Bernard began to giggle some more. "Did you know what he taught is at the root of happiness?"
"No," I repeated.
"Wanton!" And Bernard giggled at his wit. "Want makes you unhappy, and wanton makes you happy! Get it?" And again he laughed. Bernard is, to his credit, a cheery drunk.

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

Then Bernard sounded very sober. “Well think of this. Three major religions – Jews, Christians, and Muslims – call Abraham their father and yet he 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 to religious people who are considered ‘people of the book.’ That is, people who define a great deal of their religion by reading scripture. And yet given none of it would have been written in Abraham’s time, he couldn’t have defined his religion that way. Maybe all three religions have killed religion by putting it into books.” And then he giggled, throwing what I thought was a good insight into doubt.

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

"Too late," I said shaking my head. "I've written hundreds of blog postings."
"Ha!" Bernard snorted. "You call that writing?." And then Bernard tilted his head back and laughed loudly.


(revised and updated from Nov 2009)

Name Confusion

An old friend was born in Norway and is named Sveinung – but he 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress from about 1900 to the present followed from the rise of knowledge workers: inventions like the modern university and corporation, and radical advances in information technology helped to create an information economy in which companies making virtual products often became more valuable than those making “real stuff.” Communities that ignored the question 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 so must the focus.

The emergence of each new economy has forced a revolution in the dominant institution. This is no small thing. The power of elites over the institution is dispersed outwards. People once used as tools by the institution begin to use the institution, instead, as a tool. “We are all priests!” Martin Luther declared, overturning the notion that religion was something to be defined by the pope. The first economy, from about 1300 to 1700, was catalyst to the Protestant Revolution. The second economy, from about 1700 to 1900, brought us democratic revolutions. The third economy, from about 1900 to 2000, democratized finance as knowledge workers’ pension funds and 401(k) funds came to define investment markets.

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

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

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

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

Our media and attention is fixated on political – and sometimes financial – changes we could make to create jobs, but it may turn out that such changes are merely incidental to the scope of the changes needed within corporations.

Despite initial appearances, we’re living in a time of incredible opportunity. Shifting our focus to overcoming the limit of entrepreneurship 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 to emerge. Millions of new jobs depend on today’s communities redefining the corporation as dramatically as past communities redefined church, state, and bank. The fourth economy is ready to emerge but it’s not something we’ll see as long as we stay focused on trying to repair the third economy.

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

Montaigne on Trusting the Simple Man

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

"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

How Greece could pay down their debt: sue all modern countries for patent infringement on ideas of democracy, science, philosophy ..

Offering simple and natural for Halloween this year - just dropping a tablespoon of unrefined sugar into each kid's bag.

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

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

A relief pitcher was brought in just to intentionally walk a batter. So happy to know there's a pro athlete job for which I'm qualified.

Either my day was far too long yesterday or I'm suffering from an acute bout of lackadaisical tolerance.

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

Now I know why in science fiction those identical coveralls are popular. No need to pack luggage that might delay you.

Idea 4 website named gargle to offer cognitive cleanse (think brainwash not mouthwash) AND pick up poor typists trying for google.

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

“The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine.” - Abraham Lincoln

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

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

I wonder if in some 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 will camp out in their living room indefinitely.

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

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

Wonder if Jobs would have received so much praise if someone had invented a device making iPods as easy to pirate as, say, music.

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

RT @ebertchicago: Handy WashPost chart showing how 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 from McCain to Cain.

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

Actually just got 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 as constitution? So confused.

#CNNDebate Also love that Perry is so hip to 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 confiscate Romney's time.

#CNNDebate Question for candidates: Boxers or .... professional wrestlers?

Another GOP debate tonight. I wonder if they have secret backroom poker games to determine who will emerge as front runner each week.

Idea for Classical Idol reality show with historical composers judged by modern pop stars. "Mozart, you need a melodic hook."

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

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

I Ching. You, however, Clang.

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

The avant garde 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 rebranding The 4th Economy. I'm going to call it Economy 4S.

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

Post-game analysis presumes to tell you why someone won whereas post-debate analysis presumes to tell you who won.

If only he'd used his super powers for good and not evil. Apparently, even before he was president, Obama started a global recession.

How long before we have a fact check app for text we read online? To this decade what spell check was to 80s.

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

From someecards - Let's celebrate Columbus Day by walking into someone's house and telling them we live there now.

Bankers were going to occupy the inner city this weekend to protest poverty but couldn't find any good hotels.

The Fourth Economy is now available in France athttp://amzn.to/mYqD66 The words entrepreneur and millionaire are already translated.

Nobel Prize winning 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 had a little carrot wine. Really should pay closer attention to those expiration dates.

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

Just because your mind is simple doesn't mean the world is.

GUI before they were born, Pixar in childhood, iPod in adolescence. No 1 structured consciousness of 20-somethings more than Jobs.

Jobs obsoleted the 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 lower class, middle class, upper class, upper middle class, lower middle class. Is there a lower upper class or upper lower class?

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

This coffee shop advertises an "Extreme Happy Hour." Not sure how that would, in practice, differ from "Hysterical Hour."

#OccupyWallStreet is everywhere. Protestors popped up when I checked my portfolio. Now marching across monitor with itty bitty signs.

"Defy aging" the ad says. Apparently it doesn't actually halt aging but does give it the finger.

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

Why Republicans Are So Fickle About Their Front Runners

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 quickly churning through front runners. My two theories have to do with the inherent contradictions of being a Republican.

One, Republicans are contemptuous of government, convinced that there is almost nothing that government can do as well as the private sector – from pre-school education to funding retirement. Given this, they have even more contempt for politicians than the average person. How does this work when it comes to the rise and fall of political candidates? Well, a fresh face – particularly from the business sector – looks promising for the simple fact that this is not a political face. So, poll numbers go up and very quickly, this candidate looks like a politician. Suddenly, Republican voters remember that they don’t like politicians and the poll numbers for this poor candidate drop as 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 those of us who love the idea of six-pack abs and dessert after a cheese burger, Republicans haven’t quite reconciled their love of tax cuts with their contempt for deficits. Even now – with tax cuts at their lowest level in the 50+ years that Obama has been alive – Republicans want lower taxes. And they want the deficit reduced to zero. Anyone who does the math on this quickly realizes how untenable this position is. How does this translate into the rise and fall of political candidates? Well, a candidate who promises tax cuts is embraced …. until he is forced to clarify that he’ll eliminate social security or will ignore deficits or will cut defense spending. Given that no candidate can tell voters how he or she will do the impossible, no candidate has a chance of holding favor.

Republicans have got to feel like the guy who has had a mad crush on that one gorgeous girl all of high school and then – when she finally walks up 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 least credible 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 that would suppress its purpose, denying life to some new soul. In a sense (and I’m sure he’d never say it like this), the pope teaches that life begins at the moment of ejaculation.

Most Protestants disagree with this religious belief. Some Protestants – essentially the religious right in the US – believe instead that life begins at conception. Based on this belief, they have no problem with any kind of birth control but do want to make all abortions illegal. And I think that they share the pope’s disapproval of sex as something to be used just for mindless 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 of conception the new life doesn’t look much different from what it looks like at the moment before; whether we’re talking about separate egg and sperm or a newly formed zygote combining the two, we’re talking about something too small to see with the naked eye.

I think that this belief that life begins at conception is more defensible than the belief that it begins at ejaculation, if only because it is less 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, life that is less conscious of its surroundings than the simplest insect, a life that 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’re expressing a belief, not stating a fact, when we say that this is when human life begins.

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

This question about when life begins can be answered by religion, philosophy, or science, but it cannot be answered definitely by any one of these. Different scientists, different philosophers, and different religious people will reach different conclusions about when life starts. Making this determination requires judgment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh and as a footnote? Even if a person wants to base her decision about abortion on the Bible (obviously not a basis for modern law), she’ll have little guidance. There is at least 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, he should be fined. In a kingdom that meted out the death penalty for fornication, though, this punishment is fairly mild. Miscarry through violence is not an abortion chosen by the woman, by the way; this is an abortion performed against her will. Obviously, in the Old Testament they did not consider life in the womb to 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 are left 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

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

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?

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

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 the church, it took centuries for it to let go of the idea that its goal was the same as that of the church. The nation-state got its power from control over land, the first economy’s limit to progress. Yet for the longest time, monarchs thought it their obligation to also look after the souls of their citizenry. It would have seemed irresponsible not to. “Bloody” Mary used violence to move England towards Catholicism, and her younger sister Elizabeth used violence to move it back towards Anglicanism.

Once the nation-state became a tool for improving one’s condition in this life and not the next, once rulers gave up on dictating religion, a great deal of grief was avoided and a great deal of good could be done.

It’s probably not surprising that the newly dominant institution would think it should prove itself by meeting the goals of the previously dominant institution. Those goals become so intertwined through all of society that legitimacy depends on at least acknowledging those old goals. It is hard to imagine a Renaissance king dismissing religion as unimportant for policy, saying that he would focus on GDP growth instead, for instance. (For one 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 as the 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, you might say, a fact of life. But as John Abramson points out, the purpose of pharmaceutical companies is not to maximize the health of Americans; it is, instead, to maximize profits. This is problematic. He cites a World Health Organization study that ranks the US health 15^th overall in the world, a ranking that drops to 37^th if that ranking adjusts for per person spending on healthcare.[1] This in spite of the fact that US healthcare costs per person are double that of any other developed nation. Maximizing profits does not automatically maximize health.

The former management gurus Peter Drucker and Russell Ackoff both 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’t have to subordinate everything to it.

Robert Beyster, a man who helped to create billions in wealth, wrote that profit was a clear goal for the divisions within his company SAIC, but the goal was not profit maximization. He acknowledges that being privately held by employees exempted them from many of the pressures that publicly held companies feel to subordinate everything else to profits. (And curiously, SAIC’s performance with such an approach was such that any investor would have been lucky to hold its stock. More on this later.)

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

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

Ratio of Clued in to Clueless

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

It’s worth asking about the difference between nation-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 people feel 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 Address that we got the term “the United States is” rather than the “the United States are.”)

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

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

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

We never did nation-building in the Marshall Plan. Japan and Germany were very much nations before WWII. All we did was some economic development 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

‎"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big decisions in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarassment or failure, these things fall away in the face of death leaving only what is truly important. Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked - there is no reason not to follow your 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's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition - they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary"

-       - Steve Jobs - 1955 - 2011