So what’s the big deal about 3-sigma? Is it just 6-Sigma for under-achievers? Is it only for statistical geeks? Why should anyone give a hoot?
As with all powerful ideas, 3-sigma is simple, yet difficult to get your head around. Although there is no short explanation, here’s the shortest answer I can provide. It goes like this…
——–Sticky Post——–
Here’s a current events tie-in with my “Secret of Success” post.
There is little doubt that the many Court actions over the 33rd America’s Cup have been a major turn-off for the sport and sailing fans generally.
In a couple of days the sport will see a sailing match of the likes that has never been seen before and probably will never see again. Two of the highest performance yachts will square off against each other in a fascinating contest, conducted under the bare minimum of sailing rules.
Money is no object
Two of the world’s most “successful” guys are in the midst of a protracted battle royal that will culminate 25 miles off the coast of Valencia, Spain, when one or the other cheats his way to two out of three meaningless wins in the 33rd America’s Cup sailing regatta.
My Bay Area neighbor, “successful” self-made Larry Ellison, the 66 year old founder and CEO of Oracle and 9th richest man in the world, is spitting, scratching, and yowling in his fight with Ernesto Bertarelli, the European aristocrat who rates as the 52nd richest in the world by virtue of the bio-tech empire he inherited
It’s interesting, and very sad , to watch these two going at it, but the lessons to be learned, as I suggested in my previous post, the secret of “successful” people is their aim to manipulate the system to their personal advantage rather than improve the system so that everyone can win. Read more…
This post is a bit rocky and I have vacillated between whether to delete or not-to-delete. Since my blogging policy is to never delete (”The moving hand having writ, moves on..”), I will let it stand but I ask that you please read the comments accompanying this post, which may or may not help matters. If you use my secret of success, be aware that I make no warranty, express or implied, that your results will be any better than those realized through random chance. Special thanks to John Dowd for thinking on this.
Today I am going to tell you the secret of success. When I say success, I mean the process of acquiring wealth, power, and influence that exceeds by orders of magnitude, that of mere mortals. Successful people are the top dogs that dominate the crowd and, because of their domination, they are often described as “leaders”, though that attribution is debatable. They are the corporate executives, politicians, financiers, gamblers, pundits and preachers who seem to end up running the show wherever the show is being run.
Over the course of my 30 year career as a business consultant I have rubbed shoulders with quite a few successful people. For most of that time, my relationship with these individuals was, as they say, strictly business. My knowledge of them was limited to the workplace. Although no one who knows me would ever accuse me of being obsequious, my relation with power tended to be one in which I tolerated and even cultivated, a foggy subservience to those who retained me and signed my paychecks. To put it quite bluntly, my job was to give advice, but never to the extent that the advice given would jeopardize my survival. I reasoned, as a favorite professor advised many years ago, you can’t influence the system if you are cast out from that system. You also can’t pay the rent. Read more…
I hate being scammed, no matter who is doing it, and the Toyota bashing frenzy of the past week reeks of a scam designed to undermine Toyota’s success and buoy up American car makers who are both unwilling and unable to compete on matters of substance.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, when testifying before the House appropriations committee, was asked what advice he would give to owners of Toyotas subject to the recall, he replied,
“My advice is, if anybody owns one of these vehicles, stop driving it, take it to the Toyota dealer because they believe they have the fix for it,”
Soon after, LaHood amended his statement to the press by removing the phrase “stop driving it”, but not soon enough to prevent shares in Toyota stock from plummeting.
When it comes to defective engineering and manufacturing, nobody can hold a candle to U.S. auto manufacturers. If you don’t believe me, look up the Chevy Corvair (made Ralph Nader famous) and the Ford Pinto, both of which earned their reputations as death machines. But those headline making events were just the tip of the iceberg. In years passed, whenever I bought a new car manufactured in the U.S., I knew I was in for it. The first few months of ownership always involved battling with the dealership to get things fixed. Do you remember the “Lemon Laws“. It came into being for one reason only. U. S. manufacturers built a lot of lemons and if you could get your car classified as a lemon, the manufacturer would be required to buy it back from you. Of course getting a car classified as a lemon could get your killed.
Ford Pinto Crash Test
US Auto Recalls
I finally learned that if I was very clever, I could get my hands on the list of recalls for a car model. Before the days of the Internet, getting it took some real creativity. Virtually every car I researched had a long list of recalls. Most recalls were for so-called “minor” defects and if you were not diligent in your research, you would never know the recalls even existed. Some were for nothing more than chipping paint, but others could have represented safety hazards in some conditions. I had one car in which the O2 sensor would unpredictably fail and the engine would stall as I motored at 70 mph down the freeway. Was that a safety hazard? You bet! Did it make the headlines? No, it took me 6-months to uncover the cause of “my” problem and the fact that there was a recall for it.
So, has Toyota been hiding the problems with their cars? If you listen to some, you might think so. Tough talking LaHood was ready to get those Japs.
Mr. LaHood said he wants to talk directly with Toyota Chief Executive Akio Toyoda about the safety concerns involving Toyota cars and the company’s handling of those issues.”This is very serious,” Mr. LaHood said at a breakfast with reporters in Washington. “After I talk with him, they’ll get it. We’re going to keep the pressure on.”
But I’m not convinced. It just doesn’t fit what I know about Toyota. What I know is, that over the years American automakers would never admit culpability for flaws in their cars, much less shut down their sales and manufacturing. And once caught, those same automakers would obstruct every effort at setting things right. Toyota, on other hand, has been quick to admit their errors, shut down operations, and then move forward with a fix. Given the impossibility of perfection, what more could we hope for?
No product can be perfect. Given the complexity of modern automobiles, if you look hard enough you will always find plenty that’s wrong. The key question is, when flaws are discovered, does the manufacturer move forward by correcting errors and improving the product, or do they dig their heels in and fight a rear-guard action? The evidence suggests that Toyota is one of those rare companies that sets a high value on moving forward. So long as that is the case, we should laud their methods and be delighted that they take their responsibility to the consumer, seriously.
It’s not that I want to defend Toyota, but I hate being scammed, and the current headlines aimed at dethroning Toyota, reek of a ginned-up feeding frenzy designed to make me think the Toyota ain’t all that much better than U.S. cars, but when I rent and drive a late model US manufactured car, I still come to the conclusion that when compared with a Toyota, the U.S. cars are crap created by companies who regard their customers with utter contempt, and like I said, I hate being scammed.
Yesterday (Feb 1) the NYT ran a news analysis piece called “A Decade Of Enormous Deficits May Alter American Politics And Power” by Jonathan Ernst of Reuters. As I read the piece, I found myself talking back to the points put forth in the article. Below, I try to reproduce my imaginary conversation about the decent of our nation.
WASHINGTON — In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.
The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.
Could it be that our nation has been engaged in a protracted but hidden civil war, that began during the Reagan era? Has a deficit, by other names, been steadily increasing as national wealth has become increasingly concentrated and enterprises that create real value in product and service, have steadily declined? Has the concentration of wealth on “Wall Street” and among corporate hierarchies done nothing more than mask real net losses in the broader “main street” economy? Read more…
NPR ran a story today entitled “Catching Hospital Workers Dirty-Handed” in which they report:
“According to the CDC, health care-associated infections kill about 100,000 Americans a year, at a cost of billions of dollars.”
One solution being evaluated is the use of hi-tech wireless technology to spy on the hand-washing practices of individual doctors, nurses, and other caregivers.
The solutions we come up with depend on how we frame our questions. For example, in the NPR story they report that “The standard protocol in hospitals is for doctors and nurses to wash their hands on the way in to see a patient, and on the way out. But that doesn’t always happen — they get busy; they forget.”
If we frame the question in terms of who’s to blame…
We end up with the answer that inspecting and policing workers is the best solution. Of course, when we institute a system for inspecting and policing people, we also create a system of inspectors and enforcers against defectives and criminals.
Now think about this. That NPR report also says that, “Studies show that only about 40 percent of health care workers in the U.S. wash their hands as often as they should.”
No need for control charts here! Sixty percent non-sanitizers is a big, big, signal telling us that the problem is not one of individual performance. We are not dealing with outliers! If we understand the nature of a system and variation, we know immediately that we have a system that predictably and reliably produces 60% non-sanitized hands! We might be able to inspect out a small fraction of non-sanitized hands, at great expense, but we are foolish to expect a system that produces 60% non-sanitized hands to do what it does not do.
I'm sure you can come up with something better than this!
What if we frame the question differently? What if we ask, “By what means can we best assure that healthcare workers’ hands are free of disease bearing agents as those workers move from patient to patient?
Can we design a worker-sanitizing system that minimizes worker decision-making requirements regarding whether to sanitize or not to sanitize?
If we could accomplish this, wouldn’t everybody win?
When lawyer Dan Pink tackles the subject of motivation, he does what lawyers are apt to do. He gets the details right but almost everything else wrong.
The problem is that Pink continues to work from a fallaciously reductive theoretical foundation. Because of this, the techniques he suggests are correct, but the explanation he provides is upside down. This leads him to incorrectly dichotomize motivation into “extrinsic” and “intrinsic”. He is not alone in making this disastrous error. Read more…
In today’s NY Times business section:
As a sailor, I find many parallels between the enterprise of sailing small boats on big oceans and the business of doing business. In making our way at sea the crew, which is comprised all who are aboard, share a set of aims and a system for realizing those aims—their boat, their methods, and their ability to work together. Seamanship represents the whole of their theory, skill, and methods for voyaging.
In sailing, heaving to is a way of slowing a sail boat’s forward progress, fixing the helm and foresail position so that the boat doesn’t have to be actively steered.
When I teach others to sail, I teach that even though crossing oceans under sail is a most practical endeavor, the dictates of well-formed theory is the key to survival. This is called seamanship. What seems expedient in moments of adversity must always meet some test of a broader understanding of the titanic forces that are beyond a crew’s control. When theory and practice are challenged at a fundamental level—when the best course of action cannot be determined with reasonable certainty—-the crew must, if at all possible, heave-to.
The idea of heaving-to does not come easily to our ambitious animal spirits. In situations of adversity we are prone to reaction rather than reflection. But actions taken on the basis of faulty understanding are more apt to make things worse, which prompts more action, which makes things worse, and so on. As Dr. W. E. Deming explained, if we start reacting to individual data points when it is our system itself that is producing unwanted variation (lack of predictability) then we are “off to the Milky Way”.
Toyota, the Japanese automaker, calls their seamanship, “The Toyota Way” and that body of theory is now being put to the test. Superficially, they have a problem with a sticking gas pedal on their popular Camrys and Corollas and superficially the problem and solution are all too familiar: Do a recall. Engineer a solution. Fix the gas pedals. But it appears that Toyota sees the problem in a broader light. The crew regard the gas pedal problem as a symptom of a larger challenge to their system. That larger challenge includes the titanic economic forces that are raging in the world today that have loosed a chaos of increasing unpredictability and undermined their assumptions that have become too tidy.
“By chasing numbers, they (Toyota) were becoming seriously outstretched,” said Masahiro Fukuda, manager of research at Fourin, a global automotive research company based in Nagoya, Japan. “Many of us weren’t surprised over the big recalls; we were more surprised that it took Toyota so long.”
“Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, has himself berated the company for excessive confidence, which he said had set the company up for a painful fall in the global economic crisis.”
“But Mr. Fukuda said he saw Toyota’s decision to suspend sales as a typical Toyota move. “At a Toyota factory line, when something goes wrong, they stop the whole line.” he said. “Now Toyota is doing the same thing, at the company level. That’s the Toyota way.”
Is Toyota’s shutdown merely a damage control tactic or does it reflect genuine seamanship? By shutting down their manufacturing and sales operations, it appears that Toyota is putting their money where their mouth is.
In an Op Ed piece in today’s NY Times, “Between God and a Hard Place”, James Wood makes some interesting observations about the earthquake in Haiti and God. He calls our attention to two invocations that are particularly notable—one is from Pat Robertson and the other from Barack Obama.
Pat Robertson took to his lectern to opine that the devastation wrought on the people of Haiti was God’s retribution for the deal they cut with the Devil when overthrowing French rule. Crass but consistent, given Robertson’s observations about hurricane Katrina and legalized abortion.
Barack Obama also took to the podium to comment on the earthquake and aftermath in Haiti, and he too invoked God, saying, “we stand in solidarity with our neighbors to the south, knowing that but for the grace of God, there we go.”
Wood’s excuses Obama for implying that we stand ahead of the Haitians in God’s good grace, suggesting that Obama was merely parroting an oft used phrase. I don’t think so.
I remember when, back in 1966, I met Joan Baez—actually had lunch with her. Nice lady. In one of her songs, I don’t remember which, she emended the saying “There but for the grace of God, go I” to “There but for fortune, go I”. I must say, blind luck rings truer.
The meaning of the phrase with “God” at its center is not difficult to divine. Baez saw this clearly. I suspect Obama is smart enough to know what he is saying as well, but he opts for “God”, either as a political expedient or worse yet, a matter of personal faith, In either case, God help us.
Predator
I’m fast becoming a great fan the bright young writer Malcomb Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and “Outliners”. In the January 18th, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, his article “The Sure Thing”, pulls back the curtain on the myth of entrepreneurship.
People like Dassault and Eastman and Arnault and Turner are all successful entrepreneurs, businessmen whose insights and decisions have transformed the economy, but their entrepreneurial spirit could not have less in common with that of the daring risk-taker of popular imagination. Would we so revere risk-taking if we realized that the people who are supposedly taking bold risks in the cause of entrepreneurship are actually doing no such thing?
Gladwell dissects the myth of the bold risk-taking entrepreneur with deftness. The visionary risk-taker is nothing of the sort. He is a shrewd manipulator who astutely seeks out situations in which there is an “asymmetry of information” between the entrepreneur and his mark. When one party to a deal knows more than the other, his bet rapidly approaches the status of a “sure thing”, with much to be gained on the upside and little or no loss on the downside.
Gladwell substitutes the word “predator” for phrases like “bold entrepreneurial risk-taker”. In numerous posts throughout this blog, I refer to these predators as “con-men”. Gladwell’s and my meaning are precisely the same and the only wonder is that the myth of the bold risk-taker has proven so resilient in the face of the millions of marks who get fleeced out of their hard earned money on a daily basis.
Gladwell picks on the icons of entrepreneurship to make his points, and does very well, but the asymmetry of information is not limited to the wheelings and dealings of big players. In our daily life, complexification is the principal means used by predators to induce asymmetry. While each of us makes our way through daily life, conducting myriad transactions, big and small, the corporations we transact business with devote all of their attention to deciphering our limitations, habits, and vunlerabilities, with the aim to win every bet. There is simply not enough time in the day for each of us to study and understand each transaction we make—-at the supermarket, gas pump, bank, and while paying our monthly bills. The asymmetry of information guarantees that each of us will lose every bet we place.—a nickel here and a dime there.
Caveat emptor (buyer beware) may constitute sage advice in our coveted free market economy, but it is a hopeless quest. Even the most wary among us are doomed to be losers. Even if we manage to work out the rules to one game, those rules are constantly changed, leaving us once again treading water in a sea filled with predatory sharks who know more than us.
I strongly suggest reading “The Sure Thing” as soon as you can your hands on the article. Regrettably, you must have a subscription to The New Yorker magazine to read it online. While you’re looking for the article, take a moment to search my blog on the terms “con artist” and “con men” to read about my view of how predatory wizards hide their machinations in plain sight. For example, try my side-post, “Who’s for Dinner?“
This post was composed as a reply to a protracted LinkedIn discussion regarding the nature of systems. I posted on my blog because of its length.
NOTE: To Charles and Michael, and other Participants in the LinkedIn Systems Thinking thread initiated by Spyros Bonatsos. If, after reading this, you remain interested, I suggest reading my sticky post about 3-sigma and a theory of knowledge.
First, despite appearances, I do not think that the exchange between Charles Weatherford and myself was very far a-field from the central topic. In my final exchange with Charles (last night PST), he took issue with my suggestion that Western societies are the embodiment of a cultural system grounded in Social Darwinism. In other words, it is grounded in an ill-formed vision of Darwin’s theory in which Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” governs human relations.
At the same time, Michael Ervick posted a simple yet profound question. “Do systems learn?”. Michael has posed this question in the past on other forums, and it has always intrigued me, but the effort required to propose an answer kept me from trying. In this post, I am going to try to respond to the questions posed by both Charles and Michael. I want to caution readers that this is not easy ground. Thinking about thinking is as challenging as it gets, but nothing could be more on-topic when exploring “Systems Thinking”. Wish me luck! 
(I will happily return to the thread-in-point if the discussants decide to reply on LinkedIn.)
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I wrote this post for my sailing blog but I realized that the message regarding the interaction between doing and knowing portrayed in this post has implications for readers of this blog as well. If you are so inclined, you can tackle the rather academic paper entitled “Pragmatism and Deming” which sheds light on Dr. W. E. Deming’s view of the interaction between doing and knowing. In any event, do read the short blog entry and watch the movie. Consider how the interactions between man, boat, and sea played out in this fascinating and tragic story.
I don’t think you will be disappointed.
People give various reasons to explain why they put to sea in small sailing boats, but once underway those reasons are overwhelmed by the immensity of their undertaking. Our will becomes transformed by the demands of our enterprise, often driving us toward unintended destinations. The persistent illusion that we control our destiny is quickly set right—influence? YES, control? NO. At sea we become immersed in the whole of our circumstance and the best we can hope to do is to shape the force of our will to harness the greater forces that envelop us. We are both the creators and the created. The act of voyaging under sail reveals this truth more vividly than any other endeavor.
The movie “Deep Water 2006″ is a powerfully moving testimonial to this fact.
In the “Small Business” section of today’s New York Times is an article entitled, “7 Businesses That Did Not Survive” detailing the case histories of some small businesses that failed during 2009.
As a long-time consultant to business and now, a SCORE volunteer, I have seen plenty of small business failures. In retrospect, the owners of failed businesses can always come up with a list of reasons for their failure, but in the final analysis, it all boils down to the same thing. In the language of mountain climbing, they overextended their lead.
When you are climbing a mountain, you make some predictions about how things will go as you ascend and then commit to some level of acceptable risk. As you lead the way upward, you place some points of protection, called belay points, in the rock and clip in a climbing rope. While you are always looking to move upward, the prospect of unpredictable adversity guides your every action. As leader you are always asking, “What if”, and you make every effort to guard against future events that cannot be known with certainty.
As leader, if you take a fall it will be, roughly speaking, twice the distance from your last point of prediction. If your lead is overextended, your fall will be so violent that it will tear your protection point from the rock. Long falls usually result in serious injury or death.
In climbing and in business, the one thing we can be certain of is that things go up and things go down. The science and art of business involves learning how to ascend AND descend without getting killed.
“Go for it” is not enough. In my experience no one teaches small business entrepreneurs methods for predicting and managing risk. Come to think of it, the leaders of our biggest banks don’t get it either! They solve the problem by getting some other poor suckers to run the lead for them. It’s called BAILOUT.
“Saturn Devouring His Son”*
In my over-long New Years’ Resolution post, I demonstrated that our war habit is a function of our economic system rather than one of human nature. It is also true that our economic system is a function of the choices we make rather than human nature. Even in the extremis of famine and fear we must choose whether or not to eat our children.
In his New Year’s editorial, “The Big Zero”, Paul Krugman correctly observes that we have spent the last decade wallowing a miserable morass of unfortunate “surprises”, reliably and predictably created by our own willful stupidity. And there’s no end in sight.
The world “out there” doesn’t care whether we live or die. It is up to us to employ our uniquely human faculties in our struggle for survival. Our current system is built on the idea that you can go it alone. That’s stupidity! We’re all in the same boat and it’s time we face up to the challenges before us. As they say, “It’s not rocket science”. If I had to chose one thing above all others that we should do in order to avert certain disaster, it would be this:
Across the board, institute a single system of progressive taxation from 0 to 99% and plow those revenues back into the system as a whole. (In the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, this is called the general “Welfare”). Doing this will assure that we are all working together in the same system, to create wealth that is sustainable, and improve constantly.
Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, individuals will still be able to get rich, but under such a system, they will actually have to earn it.
One System - Everybody wins!
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* The Goya image, “Saturn Devouring His Son”, portrays the Roman myth of the god Saturn devouring his sons out of fear that they would someday kill him, and take on his role as a god. The story is based on the ancient myth of a man in fear of his children. It represents the betrayal of children attempting to kill their father, and a father’s greed which leads to the murdering and consumption of all his children.
As we begin the year 2010, many of us resolve with sincere intentions to cast off our bad habits. But as we all know, shaking off bad habits is easier said than done. Real change requires that we dredge up from the dark abyss of our habitual minds, a new and self-critical awareness of the patterns and assumptions that have chained us to behaviors that lead us toward ruin. Only then we can start acting in less ruinous ways.
The abyss of our habitual thinking is not only a source of our individual fallibility. It also lies the heart of our fallibility as a nation of people. It’s time to examine some of our assumptions and change what we are doing for the better.
NOTE: This post really got out of hand. I wanted it to be shorter but I ran out of time.
2010 Resolve: Transform our system from one that sets people and nations against one another into one that brings people and nations together.
1: Our Worst Bad Habit
Our nation, the United States of America, was founded by a group of insurgent “terrorists” determined to throw off the religious, economic, and legal conventions imposed upon them by their mother nation.
As seen at that time, from the British point of view.
Our system was born in self-righteous violence and perhaps not surprisingly, we have continued to create and continuously improve a system that reliably and predictably produces ever increasing violence. As the timeline illustrates, in the 233 years since our founding we have been almost continuously involved in war against other nations of people.
At a minimum, we can identify about 55 distinct wars, although by some accounting the number exceeds 200. By any enumeration, our penchant for warring is clear enough, and lest you think that we make mostly wars of necessity in defense of our homeland, consider that among our wars only two, WWII and 911, represent actual attacks on upon our nation (our Revolutionary War being in itself, an insurgency instigated by us and conducted upon British colonial soil). One list includes 35 instances of outright invasions initiated by the United States. The US Department of the Navy lists 234 instances in which the United States has “projected” its military might abroad from 1776 to 1993, excluding “covert actions”.
This does not mean that all of the wars we have been involved in were necessarily “all bad”. I mean, Hitler and his Nazi’s definitely needed some serious attitude adjustment. It just means that we do a lot of warring.
An examination of our history reveals that, with exception of the Civil War and wars against the American Indigenous peoples, the vast majority of our warring enterprises have been carried out on the soil of other nations in acts intended to acquire territory or to influence the affairs of those nations. These acts were often described as righteous moral callings, in which it was our “Manifest Destiny” to bring to ignorant and oppressed peoples the virtues of our ideas about freedom and democracy. In fact though, it seems there was usually some economic motivation lurking beneath our veneer of moral rectitude (wink, wink).
Approximate Locations of US Military Actions 1776 to Present
In addition to warring on other nations, our system also reliably and predictably produces warring among ourselves. Although our Civil War stands out in bold relief, a less obvious but clearly related war has been ongoing in our nation. This continuous, low-level conflict is one that pits race against race, haves against have-nots, and gender against gender. It seems that our system is a never-ending font of adversarialism in which there is an endless churn of victims and victimizers—an unending war between the righteous and the damned, the powerful and the powerless. One measure of the conflict within is the rate at which we imprison our fellow citizens.
Top 10 Imprisonment Rates (Relative to highest)
What is it that turns so many of our fellow citizens into criminals?
As a new feature of this blog, I will be answering questions submitted by my readers. The following answers are for Dick but I am certain many readers will find them useful in these trying times.
Dear Dick,
You ask some good questions. Let me address them one by one.
Submit your questions to the Answer Man at:
GimmeAnswersNow@3sigma.com
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Is “Greater than expected” good news or bad news?
Rueters (today) – “Economists had expected productivity, which measures the hourly output per worker, to rise at a 6.0 percent rate after gaining 7.2 percent in the third quarter. In the second quarter, productivity had risen 6.9 percent.”
I know we all tend to agree that being productive must be a good thing, but remember that in Econo-ese, increasing productivity means squeezing more production out of fewer workers. Layoffs tend to boost productivity. This is why, the same article includes the observation that:
“Productivity has grown for five straight quarters as employers slashed costs, mostly by cutting jobs, to cope with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In 2009, productivity grew 2.9 percent, the biggest rise in six years.”
Over a year ago I wrote in my blog entry, “Letter to Obama”, and opined that “The great battles before him (Obama) will not be due to the economy or Islamic fundamentalists. They will be the battles to overcome the resistance of reactionaries, ideologues, and even good-willed traditionalists who just don’t get what he’s talking about.”
Obama’s problem today is that he not only understands democracy, our Constitution, and the intentions of our Founding Fathers, but that he actually believes those ideas can work. Most everyone else has given up on those ideas idea as sheer folly. Democratic process is inherently messy and inefficient, which is why Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms…” While Obama is trying to lead us toward engagement, invention, and creative compromise, the rest are are Hell-bent on bullying the system to satisfy their own desires, interests, and ambitions—-even if it kills them (and the rest of us) in the process.
Redistribute wealth in order to create a global middle class and damp out extreme variability of wealth. This will assure that all humans have a vested interest in the system the assures their safety and well-being. In-system variations in personal wealth, religious belief, location, and circumstance, will be insufficient cause for most system participants to upset the apple-cart. Special causes will still be in play—always are. Crime and conflict will still occur, but they will not be a product of the system. These will tend to be special rather than common. In such a system, the vast majority will help to improve the system, constantly.
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