There have been several bursts of American commerce over the past 170 years. Four factors have caused this: Escape from the elites in the U.S., Innovation, the End of the U.S. Elite and Market size. As I have pointed for several decades, the elites of the world have repressed innovation. Elites are the prime beneficiaries of the status quo. They... Continue reading

I watched a new CBS show The Equalizer last week and saw four recent CBS shows in the past few days. I will not watch them again. They are too ‘woke’ for me. The Equalizer is predominantly a black action program with a few white actors. All the black actors use Standard American English which is necessary in prime time... Continue reading

Jews, Irish and Japanese-Americans have no problem claiming prominent thinkers and Nobel Laureates as compatriots. The black community has a problem in this regard. I was the business manager of a black church for more than a decade and have had many close friends who are black including the black minister of the church. A few of my black friends... Continue reading

I’ve followed the Ayn Rand, Objectivist and Libertarian world for over half a century. D. Schatz recently led me to a book by Paul Rosenberg. It is a contemporary update of that world. Rosenberg paints a fictional vision in a cyber free-market fantasy. I’ve had a great deal of experience that relates to the viability of this cyber vision. I... Continue reading

When the new campus for Lowell High School was about to open in the Fall of 1963, the San Francisco School Board voted to end the century-long history of Lowell as an academically select college prep school that fed graduating students into U.C. Berkeley and Stanford. That set in motion a 25-year sequence that included me. The current School Board... Continue reading

Sometime around 1976 the Japanese State Department (Gaimusho) asked me for advice. I was known for my articles on Japan in the leading American hippie journal, CoEvolution Quarterly. The question was “‘What should Japan do about drug use by young Japanese?.”’ My advice was to allow young Japanese to smoke pot, there were no serious long- term effects. Allowing pot... Continue reading

I protected my daughters while they were growing up. I never told them about the corrupt world they faced. I didn’t protect my son. I believe this is common in the Anglo world. Women are far less likely to know about and understand the corruption around them. Corruption is the disproportionate favoritism for some people or groups. The following is... Continue reading

I’m seeing a division in our society that has many consequences. With the arrival of a global functioning Internet I am seeing several unusual phenomena. One is the social monopoly attribute of a few big sites, like Facebook, Google and Instagram. The main reason is that the first one with a large global following sets user patterns that cross geographic... Continue reading

Margo St. James died a few days ago. Margo was a very good friend. I had tried to reach her for the past eight years, with no luck. I even sent my daughter to look for her. Many people have asked me how to reach her, several to do interviews and make a film, no luck. It looks like she... Continue reading

I saw it personally as a Legislative Analyst in 1963. There were a couple of intelligent decent men in the legislature, but they left when they saw the lay-of-the-land. The legislature became an instrument of a political machine. The man who created most of this machine was Jesse Unruh. He had a knack for finding electable politicians and funding their... Continue reading

Over a lifetime of being a statistician there are a few things I have observed. Sample size Sampling technique Bayes Theorem Sample size I have found over many decades of doing ‘truly random’ surveys on a wide variety of subjects that a sample of 25 can be just as accurate as a good survey of 400 or more. The key... Continue reading

(This is a blog from 2012) Sometime around the middle of the last century was the peak 'future' for Lefties. Marxism has always argued that because it was rooted in Engels theory of history that Marxism comprised the entirety of the future. As a consequence, Leftists have always believed that the inevitable future was theirs. I pick 1959 as the... Continue reading

There are three elements to a corruption reduction process. I say ‘reduction’ because eliminating corruption is not desirable. Every system has flaws, sometimes very bad flaws, and corruption is necessary at the margins to cope with these flaws. As an example: most residential zoning laws are hostile to carrying on commerce in a residential area. This is a serious flaw... Continue reading

I have argued in earlier blogs and in my book The Most Important Book, that significant innovation does not occur in societies with a powerful hereditary elite class. I figured this out by seeing that the Industrial-technical revolution in the 19th Century occurred because the oldest primogeniture son was left in England while the innovative siblings, driven by trade, were... Continue reading

This was an email to a young friend who will soon graduate from high school and would like to be away from home while in college: Next year may be the first year for a reasonably priced superior college education. I was offered scholarships to Harvard and the U.of Chicago. Harvard meant entry to good jobs and Chicago offered the... Continue reading

Now we patriots hate the corruption in Congress and we hate the corrupt city machines that are endemic to America. Americans have long known about and hated the corruption in government. By the turn of the 1900s we began installing civil service tests for most federal and many state-local government jobs. We have always known that corruption was dominant in... Continue reading

I don't often let myself take the superficial pleasure of writing about daily politics. But tomorrow is an election that will be historically exceptional. I have predicted for over a year that Trump could win every electoral vote and both houses. My concern at this moment is that the losing party will again fail to understand why Trump won such... Continue reading

The most amazing development in the past few decades has been the appearance of the American Samizdat. The term 'samizdat' comes from the vast underground publishing world that arose among the dissident intellectuals in the USSR. Person to person circulation of books, zines and poetry. It was real. Once in St. Petersburg, I was able to have a confidential conversation... Continue reading

The poor in America are punished by the Democrat Party in many ways. A disproportionately high proportion of the poor are Black. This is not a political blog. When I was young in San Francisco, the black population was 11%, today it is 3%. Then there was a thriving Black scene with black music, food, churches and community life. I... Continue reading

I was born in Manhattan but left to follow my mother at 6 months. During my most productive years from age 21 onward I've lived in San Francisco. I have often written about the way America and the world see news and history from a New York centric perspective. Boston, D.C. and West LA are often include if they are... Continue reading

Jew-haters regularly complain that Israel is a theocracy. That it is the only single-religion nation. They are flat out wrong. There are obviously many Islamic nations and many of them are intolerant of non-Muslims. Both Indonesia and Malaysia are examples where the non-Muslim Chinese minority are harshly treated. Both are large countries with a total population of over a quarter... Continue reading

My close friend, Robert Gnaizda died in August. Bob, a Jew, was the leading public advocate in America and the most successful. At his memorial I said that the two of us were fortunate to have lived in the exact brief period of non-Jew-hate in America. What we, two Jewish boys, accomplished was only possible for Jews from 1965 to... Continue reading

Many of us joke that LBGT is really LBGTQRSTUV. In some ways it is not a joke. I write this blog because I see that the level of sexual confusion in the society around me is at a very high level and many young people have a justifiable fear of sex. I have particular concern for my grandchildren. Sex education... Continue reading

This is a problem for many who see the world through data and original documents. A great deal of the Lefty world around us is in a state of sheer paranoia. A giant paranoid bubble. How do we know where the paranoia ends? The data-documents-people of the world are not paranoid about major issues. We know from much data there... Continue reading

This blog is about the labor market which is different from what we imagine. Healthy economic growth is possible with fewer workers in the labor force. My title comes from the English usage which I find in the Cambridge Dictionary. “redundancy noun (Not employed) a situation in which someone loses their job because their employer does not need them: [The... Continue reading