Future Studies

Artificial Intelligence Applications Increase

2012-02-13T20:29:00.001-08:00

Pamela, in fact, according to recent updates on economic trends to which your humble servant here subscribes, it is automation, sophisticated automation, that has enabled America to continue to increase productivity and reduce the workforce at the same time!

We think unemployment is a sign of failure of American industry. Yes, from the perspective of human damage it can be see this way, which is why retraining is crucial. We need to "up-skill."

Therefore, AI is at work good and hard out there.

Like all technologies, it has an upside and downside. It is like fire, which is a technology, which can keep us warm or burn us up.

The Threat of US Institutional Breakdown and Secession

2011-12-22T19:09:00.001-08:00

Walter, Dick Morris, President Clinton’s political strategist, until Morris got caught with a hooker, wrote a book called eVote. In it he talks about information (true), misinformation (half-true through ignorance, oversight), and disinformation (purposely false, misleading). He points out that survival today depends in large part on our ability to distinguish among them, for we base our decisions, actions on what we know, or think we know. He restates your point here, and vice versa.

I just finished Mark Steyn’s After America (2011). In it he argues, that decline is one thing; fall is another. Societies go into declines, as did Rome, but its fall was rather abrupt when barbarians stormed the city. He predicts something like that is at work right now, a decline, and suddenly, an abrupt, surprise fall. What your humble servant here sees is the crack up of the now overly-centralized industrial approach to systems, e.g. education, economics, politics, etc. Steyn makes the same argument.

Morris by the way argues that the Internet, as it is now, allows us to bypass these co-opted, centralized systems.

In other words, decentralization will replace the present outmoded, dysfunctional centralization – Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” here – get the old off the road to make way for the new. We cannot save these centralized systems from themselves; we are best engaged with nurturing our own peace of mind, encouraging entrepreneurship to plant new decentralized seeds, and preserving the best traditions given to us for tomorrow, cf. the medieval monks.

I look at people around me, and on the whole, I see good people. They do not deserve to be abused. I am simply doing what I can to soften, remove the abuse.

I am now reading a fab study of the Copperheads, the anti-war Northerners. What is striking is how many of them anticipate the same arguments today, here, e.g. the preservation of some semblance of constitutional government. They also opposed over-centralization; they even proposed a third country – US, Confederates, and the Northwest Confederation of the Great Lakes States.

We are going to experience, at least here, the same stresses, as Celente argues, toward secession that once drove the agenda here. Call it secession, call it local control, call it decentralization, but it will be resistance to the over-centralized systems that in the US are bleeding us to death on many levels.

Thank God every day you are in Canada. You are not at war. You do not have vampires in charge of your economy. You do not have a parasitic under-class. Your economy is robust. You do not have people carrying concealed weapons all over the place. You are not polarized as are people here, more and more, which is frightening, for it recalls the Copperheads and the dynamics of the US Civil War. We do not need to repeat some variation on that sad story; at the present rate, we are risking institutional failure; what flows from it could be ugly.

However, God is good. We shall always be disappointed if we put our trust in men, human institutions, in the final analysis. We are off to Amish / Mennonite country in Eastern Ohio next week for several days en route to Florida. They offer a model, which we have discussed before, about how to be in but not of the world. Amen. Amen. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours.

The Future of Taxation

2011-12-10T20:17:00.001-08:00

Jessica, your humble servant here once spent 2.5 months in Greece, which is close to Italy in geography and mindset.

At that time 1/3 of the Greek economy was "off the books" in cash transaction! The people simply could not, would not pay the huge taxes on them.

Frankly, this writer hopes the "off-the-books" cash economy in Italy continues, and in Greece too. We are heading down the same path.

US Government Citizen Robbery Trend

2011-12-07T21:26:00.001-08:00

Cornelia, according to the information your humble servant has received from his local postal workers, the Congress, government of this country took the $5 billion profit from the USPS and applied it to bank bailouts and oil wars.

In fact, the USPS has been operating in the black, at a profit. It is the politicians who have raided this surplus and then turn around and accuse the USPS of being an economic negative.

Apply the same logic to Social Security and Medicare. The Congress, government of this country raided these funds too for the same reasons - bail out Wall Street and fund oil wars overseas.

The concern of this writer is the job security of the decent persons who work hard day in and out at our local post office. It is sad, sad, sad.

Factory Centralization and Internet Decentralization

2011-11-20T21:12:00.000-08:00

Rhonda, restructure is of special interest to your humble servant here. He has a special interest in how IT can restructure organizations, society.

For instance, in Wisconsin, where he lives, the state agencies are massive, dysfunctional leftovers from the Industrial Age, which values factory-style centralization.

The model in the Internet Age is networks, decentralized; here in Wisconsin we pay a huge price in taxes for dysfunctional centralized organizations.

This writer plans to do something about this in the near future!

Northwest Illinois - A Sign of the Future

2011-11-20T19:53:00.001-08:00

Dr. Raftery, today I took a drive through my old stomping grounds, NW Illinois. What struck me was the deterioration in the economy.

The town where I lived, Warren (population 1600), for seven years, 1981-1988, is moving toward becoming a ghost town. The small downtown is even smaller – with scores of empty buildings now. The houses lack upkeep, e.g. paint.

What really jumped out at your humble servant here were the protest signs! There were, for the first time ever, in my memory, hand-painted protest signs against agri-business gobbling up more small operators, against real estate speculators snapping up farmland, and a protest against the Galena State Bank for foreclosing on a veteran. Plus, my friend’s booming real estate business is now closed; he was not home for me to get an update on why. You get the picture.

It is the first sign of populism that mirrors the Wall Street Occupy.

Wall-Mart was busy outside Galena, but the people looked rough, and the clerks seemed to be persons who had jobs elsewhere at one time, for they were older, 40ish.It was a real eye-opener about the deterioration, dislocation, desperation growing out there.

Mt. Horeb is buffered yet because of its proximity to state offices and civil service commuters from here. Thank God I am in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin near Madison.

This weekend’s drive mirrored what I saw last weekend in my hometown, Portage, Wisconsin, but the dislocation in NW Illinois is even worse. We are moving into uncharted waters, and land is not yet in sight. Take care.

The Future of Docment Mismanagement in Wisconsin State Government

2011-11-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

Craig, your federal agency problem mirrors a possible directions for your humble servant here along similar "document management" lines.

My name has been put before the Governor of Wisconsin for appointment to the new state regulation reduction task force for small business. It would be a three-year appointment.

What your humble servant sees is a situation at the state level similar to what you describe here at the national level. In fact, it is not regulation, or over-regulation, that is breaking the backs of small business. It is duplication of paperwork because of information "silos" in the state agencies.

In other words, businesses are entering and re-entering the same information over and over because the state government has no mechanisms for sharing basic customer, client, citizen, business information among bureaucracies.

As a result, it seems business is over-regulated when in fact it is the poor "document management" that is the challenge, issue.

It is amazing how we can apply MIS (management information systems) to clear up the old bricks-and-mortar ways of doing things, and yet we do not.

Thank you for this example. You are not alone in this challenge! Dr. Rux

Futurism Goes to School - Graduate School

2011-11-14T21:18:00.000-08:00

Evaluation of IWA 1 Applicability
In Accredited U.S. Healthcare Organizations
By
John J. Garcia

A Project Presented to the Faculty
Of Jones International University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Doctor of Business Administration

Dr. Paul Rux, Ph.D.

I would like to acknowledge Dr. Paul Rux for also providing the necessary guidance and support throughout the three-year program at JIU. Dr. Rux is familiar with quality systems and various forecasting techniques and methodologies currently in use today. Dr. Rux has provided input into this research study in areas such as the Delphi Technique and the qualitative approach used.

Back to the Future

2011-11-14T11:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I took a drive to my old hometown of Portage, Wisconsin. It was a shocker, for the town has declined visibly.

At the Kwik-Trip I briefly visited with a young clerk, who said he moved there from Sun Prairie at age 3. He stated that the town has become “rougher.” I concurred.

The key is lack of jobs. The “Rust Belt” has caught up with the town. Gone are the blue-collar jobs that underwrote a healthy lower middle class, blue collars, and a vibrant middle class, white collars (in which my parents were).

I left with a realization that my links to the town are now gone, for change has happened. What was no longer exists, except in my memories.

I came also to realize that I now, thankfully, live in Mt. Horeb which is miles ahead of Portage, is economically sound, vibrant, and feeding off the nearby high-tech, billion-dollar Epic medical software applications in Verona.

Also, high-teach, bio-teach UW research park 2 is slated to take root at Junction Road, which is 20 miles from Mt. Horeb. Its prosperity, the economy of the future again, not the gone-forever rust belt cheap labor manufacturing, the stuff of old Portage, is rooted in information systems and biotech systems.

These are the engines of the coming new economy of the 21st century.

In other words, I have come full circle. I started in Portage, Wisconsin, a vibrant community of the 20th-century industrial economy, and am now ending in Mt. Horeb,Wisconsin a vibrant community of the 21st-century knowledge economy.

As I drove back from Portage to Mt. Horeb, a distance of sixty miles, I realized that I was in fact driving home on many levels.

Coming World War III and Institutional Failure

2011-11-11T10:25:00.000-08:00

Dave, Gerald Celente has it right. The blood-sucking vampires will drag us into a wider war to deflect domestic upheaval over the domestic economic terrorism here.

The Pennsylvania State, Joe Paterno scandal is further proof we are descending into institutional failure. One after another the institutions of this country display a total disregard for others and focus on their own money-making, regardless of the toxins this greed produces.

We are echoing the later stages of Rome when the intelligent people withdrew, for they saw there is, was no way to reverse course, and why sacrifice whatever peace of mind you can have here for a lost cause?

I have often thought about the speed of communication, the time factor, in social, political, cultural, economic dynamics. At one time it took weeks to send messages over Roman roads. Today it is instant. Therefore whatever processes of integration, disintegration, growth, collapse occur at ever-faster speeds today than when it took literally weeks for news to reach Williamsburg, Virginia from London, England.

We are living the new high-speed processes of social, cultural, political, economic dynamics because of communication speed. It took Rome two centuries roughly to collapse. We are compressing the collapse time faster and faster.

I do not want to waste my limited time on this earth on lost causes any longer. Yes, I believe in practicing kindness, but for me it will be one-to-one, local, immediate, with a human face on it and immediate accountability.

Forget the institutions and their self-serving humanitarianism. They are failing because they are hopelessly corrupt. There, I finally got that off my chest.

The Future of Volunteer Management

2011-11-09T20:39:00.000-08:00

Erin, here is a perspective.

Your idea of volunteer consultants is excellent. Here is why.

More and more as the economy continues to crash, people are not going to be able to volunteer for free. They will volunteer if their volunteer work somehow contributes to their employability.

In other words, except for 14% of the top elite institutions that will attract rich volunteers who seek social status, social connections, or some other personal reward, 86% of the population today will not be able to donate time.

In other words, volunteer managers are now in the workforce development business!

Now, here is a huge opportunity. In fact, your humble servant here did a workshop on this at the state convention of the volunteer directors of Wisconsin! Nobody disagreed. Skills, contacts, references, and emotional support between jobs are the stuff of future volunteer programs, for most places, if they want them at all.

Therefore, your idea of "volunteer consultants" fits into this picture of the future very well. To use volunteers as "consultants" elevates their expertise, talents in the eyes of other people, especially potential employers, especially if in fact the volunteer "consultant" actually operated at this level of expertise.

Moreover, given the layoffs of more and more high-priced older workers, e.g. Boomers, you ought to be able to tap into such "consultant" demographics.

In summary, "consultant" is a subset of "workforce development" - which is the future of volunteer work except for the elite organizations that will attract the social, economic elite because of status.

Last week, your humble servant here, attended a local service club meeting. What struck this writer is how the leadership assumed people would have time galore to volunteer. More and more they do not. For this reason, volunteer organizations more and more are hurting for members.

One way to make volunteer work attractive is to cast it in the mode, mold of workforce development. Enter consultant volunteers as one aspect of this approach.

My suggestion would be to look at the "workforce development" challenge and how to meet it. This will make you "golden" in the world of nonprofit management.

Future of Economic Development in Ireland and Wisconsin

2011-10-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

Dr. Raftery, this is incredible! I plan to answer this and open the door to possibly doing some teaching in his new global business certificate program. It would be one way to cover travel to Ireland as a business expense.

It would also be a great way to explore business incubation opportunities (practice / teaching) in Ireland, which, according to David, is hurting badly for jobs. He rates Ireland one notch above Greece for economic misery.

My tutor at Trinity College, Dublin, was the late David Andrew Thornley, or DAT, as he signed his memos. Thornley was a pioneer in opening the West of Ireland, the Shannon area, to economic development. I would love to continue in his example, tradition.

He was one of the greatest ever, the youngest professor ever at Trinity, at age 30! He was president of the boxing club at Trinity when he was a student, and this caused students to hold him in awe – including your humble servant here.

Above all, he was superbly smart and polished – and set standards, e.g. come to class in the required academic gowns. As he said, “We are not butchers, bakers, and candle stick makers, and we dress accordingly for our work.”

In my little way, I would like to pick up where he left off – died of diabetes at age 48 in Brussels, Belgium, as Ireland’s representative to the EU. Yes, the “old ruts” – as Taoism teaches – are best.

God willing, McWilliams, if approached properly could be that bridge to an exciting application of business incubation ideas here and there – plus possible Mp3 downloads.

More and more, I see the incubation as the opportunity because nobody is doing it, and we need jobs, here and there.

His mother was Irish, and his father was English. He started life in the UK, but his family left when the Blitz started. He literally told of his being in the subways at night when the German bombers struck.

He admired Churchill for rallying the British people under attack, despite the differences between Ireland and the UK, and Thornley was ambitious in Irish politics, getting elected to Parliament (Dail) as a Labor Member, and eventually becoming Minister of Labor for a short time during a Labor government there. I admire his moral courage – as well as he physical courage as a boxer.

I last saw him and his wife at the concluding Trinity Ball formal. He was smoking a big black cigar!

Yes, McWilliams may be a surprise, God-given, fork in the road. I love his work, vision, analysis, which makes teaming up with him easy.

He wanted at one time to interview me by phone about the voucher schools in Milwaukee, but it did not materialize. I guess he notices that he has a fan in Wisconsin – probably the only one, now, which works for me. He is a Trinity alum, so we have bonded there.

Also, Wisconsin and Ireland did a lot of cross-border sharing of ideas in the 1920’s when Ireland became the Free State. It looked to our cooperative movement and river dam complex as models for the Shannon dams and rural development there. I would love to write a book on this sharing; in fact, I could add my own chapter to it through business incubation.

He wrote a piece on how Ireland needed to foster more homegrown family businesses, not branch plants, familiar story, there, for family businesses tend to stay where the family founded them, e.g. Guinness.

Wow, I cannot grasp yet what may have happened here. Your input is welcome; if things progress, there may be a chance for you to benefit from this. You certainly have the track record – and deserve paid travel to Eire.
Paul

The Future of Leadership

2011-08-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

Gehan, this is excellent. You carefully define the key concepts for the reader before analyzing them. Your analysis, moreover, includes a first-class comparison of two key concepts about leadership. You do this very well. Comparison is a great way to learn.

Americans are obsessed with leadership. People talk most about what they do not have! If you are well fed, you do not as a rule talk about food. The constant jabbering about leadership - required yes at times - in American society gets boring, especially when we are watching the dissolution of the highly centralized factory model for organizations, in which the general, CEO at the top, led.

Today, we more and more see enterprise as self-organizing systems in which each person leads! You have done nothing wrong here. You have proved your mastery of key concepts in this basic field, but do not let it trap you. Good job! Dr. Rux

The Future of Naval Warfare

2011-08-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

Eric, once again, you “hit the nail on the head.”

Sir John Keegan, the esteemed military historian in the UK, sadly ailing, wrote an excellent study of naval warfare, which you may already know, The Price of Admiralty.

In it, he argues exactly what you state in your superb essay on the decline of US naval power. Keegan wrote in his last chapter that the naval warfare of the future would be submarines, and as a result, the “hunter” submarine that would track and destroy other submarines would be the key naval weapon of the future.

He projected naval battles would be literally fought underwater because of the satellite and radar tracking potential that could target missiles at surface ships.

Of course, the military-industrial complex in the US cannot makes gazillions of dollars from “hunter” submarines as it does from the now obsolete aircraft carriers.

Once again, the winners never learn anything.

We are getting ready to refight World War II. The French Maginot Line was in place to refight World War I. We know what happened to the Maginot Line.

Thank you again for your superb analysis and writing. Keep it coming!

The coming economic reality check for many Americans

2011-08-27T20:45:00.000-07:00

Ursula, bingo, you "hit the nail on the head."

Too many Americans have a lousy work ethic, or none at all.

As you observe, often they do not bother to show up to work.

Why should we blame business then for outsourcing production to countries with strong work ethics?

Some of the economic damage in this country has been by this country to itself because it has become lazy, undisciplined, entitlement-minded on too many levels.

The coming economic crash is going to provide a huge reality check for lots of Americans. They are not worth what they think they are.

The coming Post-Human Age

2011-08-22T20:17:00.000-07:00

Todd, yes, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is not yet able to cope with the complexity of reality.

However, your humble servant is reading Mark Steyn's 2011 book After America. In it he provides scenarios about the future, 2020-2050.

He terms the future the "post-human" age because AI-based robotics will more and more replace people. His argument is demographics show a declining birth rate as the population ages. To provide the caregivers for the seniors will require automation of such care.

Enter AI (Artificial Intelligence) driven robots! Imagine!

Nonprofit Trends 2011

2011-08-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

This is advice about a dissertation research topic by Dr. Paul Rux to one of his 2011D.B.A. (Doctor of Business Administration) students

Sustainability techniques for nonprofits ought to be wide-open to new research.

Here is why. As our economy continues to crash, tank, all of us, especially nonprofits, must learn how to do more with less.

In manufacturing we call it "lean." The environmentalists call it "sustainability."

The challenge is how to stretch diminishing resources; this is going to be a huge challenge, need out there. Become expert in it; you will carve out a profitable professional future for yourself.

In fact, your humble servant here is in the process of dealing with the IRS right now about his nonprofit. It is a paperwork nightmare.

Beyond the IRS however is declining donations. I am a member of our local chapter of the AFP, Association of Fundraising Professionals, and our membership has dropped by half over the past year!

There is less and less money out there; this means what money people get, they will need to stretch, stretch, stretch.

Moreover, the IRS and Congress are threatening to remove the tax breaks for gifts, donations to nonprofits. If this happens, the "sky will fall" on nonprofits, and they will be evern more desperate to do more with much, much less than they are now.

The US stock market meltdown and coming wars in 2011

2011-08-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

Sean, in May, my wife and I visited New York City. A Palestinian immigrant told me that hundreds of millions of dollars were coming into the area as Arabs from Syria and Saudi Arabia were immigrating to New York City to avoid the coming wars in the Middle East.

Moreover, they were immediately investing this money into real estate rentals, and not keeping it in any kind of stock, bond, currency, etc.

The stock market is a gambling casino. The real economy that actually produces things stands separate from it, and we are going to learn the difference good and hard.

The newcomers to New York City, the "smart money," understand this and are bailing out of the fake economy into the real economy as fast as they can.

Also, we ought to pay attention to their fear of coming wars there for going to war is one way governments solve economic depressions.

Duty or Rights: The fork in the American road.

2011-08-04T18:24:00.001-07:00

Jeffrey, thank you for the excellenbt application of the two theories for this case to this case! Your comment below jumped out at your humble servant here:

"Many people today expect for things to just be handed to them, in life and in their career."

Our society is degenerate, which means, it has declined from its former standard or standards. Your observation above confirms what your humble servant here experiences also.

Duty says there is something bigger than me, you. It asks us to put into the equation. Rights on the other hand focus on what we get, entitlement, take from the equation. Rights without duties will desstroy us, as it surely is right now. As the Ancient Chinese Taoists observed over 2,000 years ago, a society focused on rights will destroy itself. We are watching this process right now; there may be no changing course now.

The Future of Psycho-Babble in America

2011-08-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

Jacob, your humble servant here agrees with you. We need rules. We have let "psycho-babble" blind us to the realities of human nature.

Industrial psychologists (see Working Without a Net) tell us that the average American today does not reach emotional maturity until he or she is age 40!

They are adolescents in emotion, mind, behaviors, etc. and in the real world adolescents require "structure," the better word is discipline, but that is a no-no with the psycho-babble crowd that has distorted our overall sense of social reality.

We are paying dearly for this as employers outsource production, services to youthful populations with high skills and a strong work ethic, which is what built this country.

Until words and concepts like discipline and duty regain central stature, value in American society, we are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and all the king's horses and all of the king's men could not put him back together again. So it is here, now.

Tony Soprano's America

2011-07-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

Chanel, this is good business, but at another level, it is bad mental health. If people curse you, abuse you, we have in the real world the right to say no, that hurts, stop it. Sadly, business today dictates that we pretend a happy face at all times.

The result is a growing lack of "authenticity" to use a psychological, sociological concept. More and more people must put on an act on their jobs for the reasons you state. The result is a growing anger under the surface in more and more people. In time, this will reach a boiling point an explode.

See the sociological study "Tony Soprano's America" (2005) for more detail on this trend. Tony of course was a Mafia leader; in the Mafia, pretending is part of the game, the fix. On the surface, Tony was a respectable suburban middle class home owner. Under the surface, he was a capable killer if you got in his way.

This dualism is exactly what our society is building, and professionals call this dualism "lack of authenticity." When will it explode?

The coming political explosion in America.

2011-07-05T23:01:00.000-07:00

It is sad, Walter, to realize that to survive now in this land you must more and more think and act like a Mafia member - because the "fix is in" at the "top."

On July 4th, my wife and I observed a parade in her hometown of Mineral Point, Wisconsin. The parade has been an annual event since 1827!

I saw the good, decent, normal people, who do the work, fight the wars, obey the laws, and pay the taxes, put on a two-hour parade in this small town of 2,000.

They celebrated, believed in the ideals that mark the better side of this country’s place in history.

I grieved to realize that these good, decent people, who, in effect, shaped me, my core values, for the better, are abused by the gangsters on Wall Street and their hired stooges in Washington, D.C..

The danger point is coming when these decent Americans, who love their country and do not exploit it and sell it out to "banksters," realize this, which may not be too far off in the future. How will they target the coming anger?

The Future of American Stereotypes of Educators

2011-04-21T22:10:00.001-07:00

Herman, these are exclellent choices and excellent abstracts of your choices. It is fascinating that these two articles appeared tonight for your humble servant here. The learning organization concepts firmly ties education to business. The old saying was those can do, and those who cannot teach. This is a false dischotomy, for today, those who do must be able to teach! In fact, education, the learning organization, is crucial to success, and this has helped to redefine the historical relationship in American culture between education and business enterprise. This writer has resolved to claim and work with and build on this connection further tonight because of your abstracts here! Thank you for the guidance!

The classic story of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, an old American folk tale, depicts the historical view of education in America in the person of the school teacher Ichabod Crane! Of course, he is the butt of humor and eventual abuse. We are now slowly starting to move beyond this sterotype of the educated person in our society - thankfully, although this writer loves Washington Iriving, the author, and the origin in the Hudson River Valley (NY) of these tales among the early Dutch settlers there. In fact, a Jean Paul Rux immigrated from Amsterdam, Holland, to New Amsterday, New York, now New York, New York, in 1693! The Hudson River Valley is "in my blood." In fact, it is calling to me to return to visit. I lived there for three years at Dobbs Ferry, NY, near White Plains, NY, home base for IBM (Armonk). It is funny how things fall into place. Yes, the learning organization thankfully is breaking down old stereotypes.

Germany as past, present, and probable future exampls

2011-04-07T21:27:00.001-07:00

Alexis, this writer has in fact visited Germany twice. He is the first member of his family to ever return after they left Prussia in the 1880's. He has studied German language in high school and at the university level. Both of his parents spoke fluent German, which they learned at home in Wisconsin before they learned English, which they learned at school and through their dealings of course with other Americans.

Germany stands as an example for us today for how to nurture a first-rate economy. Its history also stands as a warning against what can happen when a government destroys the currency of a country as did the Weimar Republic to pay its bills for World War I, for which Germany, of course, unjustly received blame.

History offers lessons about what to do and not to do. Only fools ignore them. It seems what passes for leaders in America have not studied recent history! They are courting economic disaster for all of us in their pursuit of short-term greed.

Germany as example and warning

2011-04-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

Alexis, this writer has in fact visited Germany twice. He is the first member of his family to ever return after they left Prussia in the 1880's. He has studied German language in high school and at the university level. Both of his parents spoke fluent German, which they learned at home in Wisconsin before they learned English, which they learned at school and through their dealings of course with other Americans.

Germany stands as an example for us today. Its history also stands as a warning against what can happen when a government destroys the currency of a country as did the Weimar Republic to pay its bills for World War I, for which Germany, of course, unjustly received blame.

History offers lessons about what to do and not to do. Only fools ignore them. It seems what passes for leaders in America have not studied recent history! They are courting economic disaster for all of us in their pursuit of short-term greed.

The coming backlash against Wall Street greed.

2011-04-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

Jose, for many years, governments in Europe lived with the very real threat of Communism. If capitalism, or business, became too greedy, too barbaric, well-organized Communist parties were present to exploit abuses and take over.

As a result, European governments developed what we call the "welfare" state. They made sure that people got proper healthcare, wages, pensions, etc.

In short, they protected capitalism from destroying itself through provoking a bloody Communist revolution.

In America, we have never had, yet, such an organized force like the Communists in Europe to "put the fear of God" into the vampires on Wall Street for destroying our economy and millions of lives in the process as poverty increases.

Your humble servant here is not a Communist. He visited East Germany and Berlin - by motorcycle - when they were under Communist control, and he knows first-hand the fear under which people live under Communism. We do not want this.

We also do not want the banksters doing whatever they want in pursuit of greed. How we curb the current economic terrorism in the US remains to be discovered. The future is going to be very interesting, and, yes, scary yet.

The Future Belongs to Exile - Again

2011-03-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

Walter, in our local bookstore last week, I found a reader on the philosophy of Albert Schweitzer in his own words, writings. It was a surprise, or an act of grace, a gift from God, again. It came at the right time moment.

In effect, Schweitzer decided not to waste his time on this planet trying to save people from themselves, e.g. Western civilization. Instead, he went where he felt his gifts, values were received with a minimum of resistance. In effect, he went into exile. Yet, he did not waste his time on lost causes, e.g. World War I and World War II. Both of them loom as colossal human disasters with time and distance from the wartime propaganda generated to motivate people to engage in killing each other.

He is offering me a model. Go where your values, skills, talents are welcome. In other words, As/Is. This is how it is, and if the society, civilization is intent on destroying itself, which the American society is, we, you, I cannot stop it.

Rather, live as best we can in situations where what we can offer, share is welcome.

I often think of the Mennonites that I saw living around Elora, Ontario. In a sense they are practicing a form of Schweitzer. They are in but not of the world’s god-awful agendas. I am not a primitive here. Rather, this setting calls to me, the Elora Gorge, the scale of the village, the art, antiques, out-of-time (nobody likes the 20th and 2lst centuries if they are sane) 19th and 18th century ambience in which hope for better days still lived.

Schweitzer taught “Reverence for Life,” not Death. Life is a gift of God, and as the Bible teaches, God is not, like the Egyptian idols, a God of death. He is the God of life, and we align with this basic reality when we “Reverence Life.” This may lead us, as it did Schweitzer, to disengage from futile efforts to save people from the consequences of their follies, for as the Bibles teaches, “the wages of sin (to deny, oppose God’s design) is death” not life.

Our dialog is an expression of Schweitzer’s insight. We share with each other, because we value what each other has to share, offer. This does not waste our time, which is short enough in this world in any case.

Yes, the meditation here is Albert Schweitzer, and I plan to read his writing with great care as a guide to what comes next, God willing.

Do not despair. It is easy to do. Rather, as Schweitzer managed, be in but not of the world. So ends the sermon of the day. Paul

Leaders are Entrepreneurs are Leaders

2011-03-10T23:37:00.000-08:00

There is an old saying: "People talk most about what they do not have." So exactly in and at a time when we really have a loss of leadership, it is, therefore, not surprising to find folks talking, writing, and researching about it!

In fact, this writer and his best-friend neighbor discussed exactly this today in the morning. However, we used the word, term, concept "entrepreneur" instead of "leadership." In fact, the end result of both is the same. We agreed.

If our country has a future it will come from entrepreneurs who will lead us into and help us seize new possibilities, opportunities.

Evangelicals, Entrepreneurs, and the Future

2011-03-10T16:49:00.000-08:00

Madeline, your comments about underdogs are insightful. Here is why. In America, we encourage entrepreneurship, risk taking. The reason we do this is because in our culture to sin and to be saved from sin provides a cultural matrix in which failure does not permanently doom us. This is part of our religious revivalism that has spilled over into our secular culture. In fact, we admire the "sinner" (underdog) who has been "saved" (successful).

Internal Exile - The Future Choice of More and More People

2011-03-03T16:44:00.000-08:00

Michael, I have been mulling how to describe, define “internal exile.” Here it is.

Exile means to leave behind.

External exile means to geographically leave something behind, but too often the exiles carry their emotional “baggage” and issues with them from their place of geographic exile. As a result, the causes, discomforts for exile continue.

Internal exile means to mentally, emotionally leave something behind without having to change geography. Internal exile means we do not change geographic location to drop what “eats away” at us.
Of course geographic exile in time can help with internal exile, but it does not automatically cause us to drop the emotional “baggage” that triggered the geographic exile in the first place.

In fact, 16th-century French essayist Michael Montaigne observed that without internal exile first external exile was a waste of effort. We cannot run away from emotional baggage. We must set it down good and hard when and where we are.
More and more your humble servant here is moving toward a posture of internal exile, for it is a cost-effective, realistic way to gain peace of mind in the middle of the chaotic muddle swirling around us today. He retreated to a stone tower in the countryside of France, where he lived, a form of geographic exile but on a modest scale, not immigrating to Quebec, North America.

Moreover, internal exile, parallels the four stages of life in Hindu teaching. Each stage represents twenty-five years in a human life span, 0-100:
Stage one is student.
Stage two is household.
Stage three is withdrawal – setting “thing down” to become selfish with our remaining time, energy.
Stage four is preparation – becoming spiritually centered to face our physical demise and spiritual transition to the world beyond this one.

Your humble servant here is now preparing for stage three of his life, which results in getting ready for “internal” exile. Others will do what they want, and we ought not to wear ourselves with a futile idealism about being able to change the rest.

There, old friend, you have my promised definition of internal exile.

The Future of Education

2011-03-02T18:25:00.000-08:00

This email comes from an old, dear friend Walter in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. We started our teaching careers together and have remained loyal friends ever since.

Hi Paul,

I concur with the idea that College is not the best way to prepare people for life. The participation rate among young people in 'higher' education is greater the than % that can benefit from the notion of a 'rounded' education. Both my experience in education and knowledge of society in general supports this view. The underlieing assumption appears flawed, namely that a few years of diversion in an institution will prepare people for life when all it does is postpone reality for many young people while placing unnecessarry burden on their parents.

I think that a university education and less so a 'college' education in Ontario inculcates a sense of entitlement to a 'good' life. It also delays adulthood especially in young males at a time when there is a shortage of skilled labour. By the time we are in our teens we need to feel we are useful to society or we become self-indulgent consumers of trivia. And we need to connect to society so that we have a real stake in political outcomes. Working while training does these things.

One of my brothers taught school while doing his 'teachers college' during summers and then his degree over a ten year period. I did my teachers training in summers as well, and believe it is more useful that way since you bring questions from the classroom to class. It also seems to me that education is not served well by having teachers who have never experienced anything but school. We should actively recruit business people, tradespeople, entrepreneurs ....to become teachers so that the schools more effectively reflect the options in society and change the culture of school. Remember Illich and 'deschooling' society?

In Canada we should make university at all levels more rigorous and focus on primary research. There are many ways that people who are curious can educate themselves in our connected world.

Are you planning to go to the world futures conference? Have you attended recently? I went to one in DC years ago and was rather disappointed so am wondering about what they are like now.

I've been delving into the Enlightenment for several months- I did major work on Francis Bacon and the scientific revolution- and am finding the likes of Adam Smith, Hume, Diderot and some Germanic types much clearer in their thinking than our contemporaries. The originating ideas of modernity are all there. In our present confusion we need to go back to some first principles.

Cheers,
walter

Coming Budget Wars

2011-02-26T23:42:00.001-08:00

Your professor lives in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, which is an "exurb" of Madison, Wisconsin, our state capitol. It is also the scene of a showdown over the future of teacher union rights, pay, benefits, etc. It is a precursor of what is to come across this country. The fact of the matter is state governments overall are out of money. Wisconsin, population 5.5 million, faces a $3.5 billion budget hole right now. Somebody must pay. One way to reduce this horrific state debt is to cut spending. This is why it is crucial for school leaders more than ever to have the skills and street smarts to know how to measure and communicate value from funding for schools. Moreover, there is going to be less, not more; we must learn how to conduct "lean" operations. We will also need to set priorities. For example, which is more important, teacher wages or new palatial school buildings? Your professor has been to the capitol square twice now in the middle of the protestors. On Monday February 28, 2011, in fact, he has an appointment with a policy planner of the Governor of Wisconsin in the Governor's Office - if he can navigate the protestors. His plan is to "dress down" to look like the protestors, not some slick corporate lobbyist. Hopefully the state capitol will be open for business on Monday coming. It was not Monday last because of thousands of protestors there. What is happening here is on the frontline of coming budget wars in this country, and education like it or not is going to be part of it. My message to the protestors was: "We ought not to be fighting each other. We did not cause this. The Wall Street banksters did. We ought to unite to go after them, not each other." Yes, nobody here did anything wrong. The damage was done on Wall Street and in Washington, and it is painful for me, a native Wisconsinite, to see my people at each other as if we are enemies. We are not. There are enemies, but they are not our people.

Gerald Celente Forecasts Global Trends for 2011

2011-02-24T19:50:00.001-08:00

What’s Next In response to the current Middle East uprisings, gold has broken above $1400 an ounce and Brent Crude climbed to $113 a barrel. There is no end in sight to market volatility. As the violence escalates and expands, the fallout will be felt around the world.

From the onset of the financial crisis that began in August 2007, and through the ensuing Panic of ’08, Washington, the Federal Reserve and central banks have managed to forestall a Great Depression-grade meltdown by way of a variety of multi-trillion dollar rescue packages, bailouts and stimulus programs. For three years the programs were able to induce an illusory and superficial recovery that, barring a major external geopolitical jolt, might have continued to run its course until the inevitable denouement.

But now the jolt felt around the world is in the process of shattering the recovery illusion. Whether deliberately (as calculated policy) or as fallout from fear-based denial, the pieces are not being put together. The current unrest is not confined to the Middle East and North Africa, and as we had forecast, it will spread to Europe and other parts of the world. The more volatile and widespread the insurrections, the greater the probability that some combination of events (e.g., oil shock, terror attack, cyber wars and regional wars) will crash already fragile economies, and roil sound ones.

Be Prepared Conditions are spinning out of control. In some countries, bank and stock market closures are real possibilities, as is the imposition of martial law. We reiterate our forecast for gold $2000. We recommend keeping cash and necessities on hand to help weather emergency situations. If the worst does not happen, nothing is lost. If the worst happens and you are not prepared, you are lost.

©MMXI The Trends Research Institute®

Who is winning and who is losing?

2011-01-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

Todd, you raise an interesting observation. Brazil did not get into oil as an income source because the technology to do deep-sea drilling only became availalbe recently. In effect, the pace of technology saved it from taking the "wrong" fork in the road, and as they say "necessity is the mother of invention." When they could not tap oil, they needed an alternative energy. Enter ethanol!

Sometimes people who think they are winning - oil producers for example - in fact are losing as time passes. Today oil dependence is a losing situation. Brazil was a loser when it could not drill its own oil, but, in fact, this forced it to take a different path which has made it, in effect, a winner today because it is not dependent in any way on oil to run its economy. Ethanol from sugar cane works prefectly.

The answer to who is winning and who is losing depends on when we ask the question.
This is why it is dangerous to extrapolate the present into the future.

This insight into a standard flaw in our perception of winning and losing trends comes from classic Chinese Taoist thought.

The next big bang on Wall Street.

2011-01-05T22:46:00.000-08:00

MINI-LECTURE – PAUL RUX, PH.D.

Last night a radio broadcast discussed the proposed $50 billion purchase of Facebook by Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street powerhouse. Why would Goldman Sachs want to own Facebook? According to the broadcast, it intends to use Facebook to create its own electronic money! John Naisbitt, a world-class trend forecaster, predicted this use of the Internet in his last book Revolutionary Wealth (2007).

According to the radio panel, Goldman Sachs will create a new “credit bubble” by issuing its own credit outside the standard banking world, which is now out of credit because of its dependence on the dollar. Goldman Sachs will no longer be hostage to the value of the dollar, which will soon have the value of Kleenex tissue, to create credit. Facebook is a superb marketing, sales channel to millions. Here we go!

Party hearty into the future - or lack of a future

2010-12-29T21:10:00.001-08:00

Herman, my visit to the main library of my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, was amazing! Here is why. I found the Cooper textbook. It is on permanent reserve and does not circulate. Within five minutes I had it in hand, after I renewed my state resident library card, $15 / year, a superb bargain. The reference librarian directed me to the copy room, and there I caught up with the 21st century. You can copy in print format for a small fee. However, you can scan copies for electronic document delivery to you by your private email address! The attachment is a free electronic scan of Cooper's 2.1 chart for our assignment 2.1. It cost nothing! Wow, this is the future of document delivery, and I love it!

Also, the student who helped me to work the system is from China, a Ph.D. student in Chinese linguistics. She and I had a great short visit about differences between East and West. I am a student of Chinese Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism. We understood each other clearly. I noticed too that all of the student workers today were Asian, which fits a pattern that I have observed before on campus. Work ethic is alive and well in the Asian students who did not take time off to party, party.

A 2010 trend forecast for America

2010-12-17T17:02:00.000-08:00

Paul,

If I get the call, I would like you and Jane to come to the installation. It would be wonderful to see you. If you are spending January in Florida, I'll try to arrange it so the installation falls later one when you can make it - and since I'm kind of in charge these days, I can probably make that happen.

I have been paying attention to some demographic research done on the area surrounding Mayville, Horicon, Iron Ridge, and Beaver Dam, but mostly in the area bounded by Horicon-Mayville-Iron Ridge. The Lutheran Church Extension Fund (LCEF) provides access to LCMS churches to demographic studies done by a marketing firm. Along with other trends and economic issues, it looks as if the area has potential for growth in the next 5-10 years. The manufacturing base is solid and my son, Jonathan, who is studying Manufacturing Engineering at Northern Iowa, says that the people in his department are very familiar with the area because they are doing a lot of recruiting of UNI grads in the manufacturing engineering and technology majors.

On top of that trend, with the potential for very hard economic times facing the nation, it is quite possible that people will be leaving the cities - Milwaukee in particular, but, potentially, also Madison and Green Bay - and heading into the smaller towns and cities across the state where jobs appear to be more available and people watch out for one another and band together to help those in need. There is also a safety issue, because if the economy tanks much further, the potential for unrest in the streets in Milwaukee and Madison, and most places where there is a significant "inner city, poor, uneducated, minority majority." That means that there may be some flight to the small cities, towns, and rural communities - leading to growth and increased economic pressure on those places. The leadership challenges and spiritual challenges will incrementally grow - we are going to need effective, moral, ethical, and spiritual leaders with good leadership skills to help our communities weather that type of storm.

Of course, what I have just stated is purely speculative, but, as Jesus noted to the Pharisees and scribes - they knew how to read the signs - the signs that we are seeing today in our nation, regardless of the effect of the election just recently past, may well bode ill for our immediate future. I share this with you because it will leaders, educators, and entrepreneurs such as you that will be critical to the nation's ability to weather the storms and come out at the other end stronger, more focused, and a more solid Republic in the manner which our Constitution is supposed to preserve and the founders envisioned.

Well, I'm rambling now. As I am not God and have not received a call from Him to be a prophet, I can only surmise and speculate based upon what I see and hear. As a student of history, however (and I know you are as well), it would be foolish to ignore the signs around us. For all the negatives that fellow Glenn Beck has, he has a finger on good information and I've found, recently, that my own research has confirmed, so far, everything I have heard from him.

Look to Canada as a model for a sane future

2010-12-07T20:33:00.000-08:00

Walter, this reminds me of “counter-factual” or “what-if” history. As Taleb argues, we play tricks on the dead (Napoleon’s definition of history) when we impost a cause-effect logic on past events that in fact were not there and only reflect the angst of our times. We select facts, which is the theme of axiology in philosophy – we seek what is of value to us.

I just finished reading The German Crisis published in 1932. An American named Knickerbocker wrote it after a year’s field study of Germany, and the last chapter includes a person interview with Hitler by the author! I read this book with the same frame of mind you suggest. Nobody in 1932 knew what was going to happen, and this is reflected in the book.

Moreover, his observations of an economy in collapse may serve as a theme, warning for us today, which also overlaps with your interest. I happened to find it by “accident” at the Canadian Bible Society thrift store in Chatham, Ontario, one of our must stops when we visit. It cost $.50, but its intellectual stimulus is worth far far more.

The seminal ideas today are Chaos Theory and Complexity, which are at the heart of Taleb. We are in effect watching the crack up of highly-centralized systems as the network logic of Internet technologies begin to reshape how things work best now. I am not saying we are going to return to a pastoral life, but we are going to Reset as Richard Florida at U of T puts it in his latest book, 2010, The Great Reset, which I highly recommend.

Here, we are watching the collapse, ongoing, of the middle class, or what is left of it. We are also moving toward institutional failure, which is a byproduct of greed and over-centralization. Dalton Camp predicted both of these trends in 1976 when I lunched with him in Kingston, Ontario after a teacher conference. He warned about the trends toward middle class collapse and institutional failure.

Thank God, in Canada, the Scottish values of hard money have prevailed to shield, buffer you from what is coming here. In fact, I keep my sanity by knowing that a place like Canada does exist. It is possible to live peacefully, productively, sanely in this world yet. Yes, it is possible. Canada is proof.

Here, we more and more have social depression on top of individual depression. We have people who cannot find work, and those who have it are more and more exploited by the system, 60’s talk there. So, as far as your humble servant here can see, chaos and complexity are in the saddle, and what comes from this, self-organization and creative destruction, remains to be seen, but we can pick up the pieces.

We will not put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Humpty Dumpty is yesterday. We can invent a saner future, tomorrow. Canada is proof.

Future of Strategy, Planning and Management

2010-11-19T22:40:00.000-08:00

THREE FUTURE TRENDS

Three key trends in the perception of information today likely will shape strategy, planning and management in the future. The trends are complexity, chaos theory, and information overload. These concepts provide key insights into how to survive and win in our ever-more turbulent environments.

Information, Misinformation, and Disinformation
The good news is because of the computer and the Internet we can capture, analyze, and share information at speeds and in quantities unknown before in history. The bad news is the mounting glut (“info-glut”) of misinformation (incomplete) and disinformation (propaganda), as well as information (reliable).

Political strategist Dick Morris (eVote.com, 1999) argues the most important survival skill today is recognizing information, misinformation, and disinformation. We make decisions based on what we know, or think we know.

Complexity
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who earned a Ph.D. in statistics from Princeton University, published a bestseller, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in 2007 that is changing how we perceive information.

Here is why: Taleb argues the new global economy is complex literally beyond understanding. In effect, we really do not know how it works. We are like the proverbial blind men who encountered an elephant and sought to describe it. One man had the trunk. One man had the tail. One had a tusk. Each had part of the elephant, but they could not picture the whole elephant.

In effect, Taleb argues we are like these blind men when we seek to describe, understand, or measure the global economy, our “elephant.” Each one of us has a piece of the puzzle, but we have no idea of how the puzzle comes together. As a result, Taleb maintains, we are busy measuring a “tail” or “tusk” – variables – and confusing it with what the “elephant” actually is. As a result, we must be wary about information.

In turn, this means we need to be prudent about strategy, planning, and management and remain alert to new information that provides another piece of the puzzle. In short,strategy, planning, and management must be “tentative” and revised constantly as new information becomes available. They are an ongoing process.

Chaos Theory
Closely related to the concept of “complexity”, is “chaos theory.” Based on the insights of quantum physics, chaos theory argues the universe and everything in it is “self-organizing.”

In the end, events and persons sort themselves out, or as the Chinese Taoists teach, “water finds its own level.” We are, in short, too quick to intervene in human affairs instead of letting events reach their logical, natural conclusions on their own. Otherwise, we create artificial conditions that sooner or later must collapse, since they are artificial in the first place.

Strategy, planning, and management need to factor in “chaos theory” to avoid investing in “artificial” situations at home or in other countries. Let problems fix themselves. Then decide.

Information Overload, Complexity, and Chaos
Complexity, chaos theory, and information overload are concept trends that have a high probability of continuing to shape strategy, planning, and management now and in the immediate future.

The concepts of information overload, complexity, and chaos theory ought not to paralyze us. However, they ought to make us careful about what information we can trust, and how much we can impose our logic and wishful thinking on the world.

Strategy, planning,and management today must remain tentative.

We must systematically update them periodically (e.g., every six months).

We must remain alert for and open to new feedback to sharpen them.

The future of coffee houses.

2010-11-15T20:18:00.000-08:00

Shelby, your humble servant here, serves on the State Leadership Council of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) / Wisconsin. We have over 13,500 small business members in Wisconsin. The Council in effect is the state board of directors of this powerful small business lobby group.

The January - February 2011 national journal of NFIB My Business will feature an interview with your humble servant here on the do's and dont's of small homebased business, which this writer operates when he is no online teaching at JIU: www.paulrux.net

NFIB national has hired a photographer to do a photo shoot of me to go with its interview of me in its forthcoming national journal on Wednesday November 17, 2010 in nearby Madison, Wisconsin.

To drive home a key point in the interview, he will not meet with the photographer at my home. This is out of the question for small homebased businesses, for the customer psychology translates meeting at home with failure. Successful people do not meet clients in their living rooms.

Your humble servant here prefers classic, polished coffee houses for such transactions - not bars or even restaurants. Coffee is the drink of the Information Age, since persons who work with computing cannot have hangovers of any kind. Cancel the two-drink luncheons.

Coffee aligns with the power of IT to set economic, business trends today; I tell the owner of our new local coffee house in Mt. Horeb that it is a crucial resource for business today, especially small businesses like mine that cannot afford really commercial office rentals.

In short, image counts. The coffee house image works perfectly for business, especially small businesses. Now, I must figure out what to wear! My wife advises sport coat and tie. We do not want to be too "laid back."

Past is prologue for decision-making in politics

2010-11-13T19:35:00.000-08:00

Your humble servant here has engaged in lobbying at the state and local levels of government. For instance, this writer is on the State Leadership Council of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) / Wisconsin.

We lobby for 13,500 small businesses in Wisconsin! Overall, NFIB ranks nationally as the 10th most powerful lobby in the USA.

In the recent elections, the NFIB-endorsed candidates for both Governor and US Senate won! Both men met privately with our Council, which numbers twenty, to explain their policies and field our questions. I have been involved with the Council as a member for nine years now, and through it I have learned a great deal about influencing folks.

I point to my track record with formal statewide lobbying because a friend who was head ATT lobbyist in Wisconsin made this comment once to me. "When you enter the realm of politics, all reason ceases."

I have seen, heard, or experienced nothing to counter his statement. Sadly, as you note, facts often have very little to do with what happens or is going to happen.

Trend Forecasting in Education and for Business

2010-11-13T14:06:00.001-08:00

Above all, your satement below spoke directly to this writer, since he designed and has taught the DBA course on trend forecasting for JIU. In fact, he was emailing Dr. Peter Bishop in Houston, a leading trend forecaster, last night about collaboration on some projects with him. Your observation below has reminded me of how much your humble servant values this approach to learning. In fact, my wife and I plan to attend the 2011 World Future Society (trend forecasting) convention in Vancouver, BC next July!

"Forecasting does not create the future; it serves as a blueprint to follow in implementing change initiatives for smoother transitioning in the future. The ability to identify the most significant business trends and the future they suggest is critical to organizational success in the 21st century workplaces. This awareness and responsiveness toward appropriately preparing leaders and workers with the necessary skills to be effective is an ongoing purpose for researching solutions. Effectively forecasting trends demands continuous adherence to consumer behavior and physical needs, relevant information, and skilled and trainable workers."

The Fork in the Road for the Future of the USA and Pakistan

2010-11-13T13:38:00.001-08:00

Lisa, Eric Margolis, an expert on this part of the world, observes in his last essay for LewRockwell.com that because of our war in Muslim Afghanistan, America must play up to Muslim Pakistan in order to chase and kill Muslim Taliban fighters in Muslim Pakistan!

This writer underscores the religious culture of Pakistan and Afghanistan for it is a crucial driver of what may happen shortly.

American military operations in Pakistan, where Taliban fighters have sought refuge, is starting to destabilize Pakistan, for it is a Muslim country, and Muslims do not like to kill other Muslims. The people there may soon overthrow the government of Pakistan for "turning a blind eye" to American military operations in its territory.

So as the USA nuzzles up to India, it risks literally the overthrow of the Pakistani government as people in Pakistan consider India to be its arch enemy - plus we are killing Muslims in Pakistan!

Check out the history of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1948 for some horrific stories about killings, of which one of my friends from India, now age 75, living in Canada, survived.

We want economic cooperation from India. We want military cooperation for Pakistan. Which is more important? In effect, Eric Margolis, with whom your humble servant here exchanges emails from time to time, says the USA cannot have Pakistan and India at the same. In the near future, we must make a choice. Which one will it be? Which one should it be?

Oh, we cannot overlook that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. If Pakistan's government collapses, who gets the nuclear weapons there - the Taliban? This has implications for horrific terrorism in the USA itself if this happens.

The Future Purpose of Business

2010-11-13T13:05:00.000-08:00

Joshua, yesterday, my lawyer and I had a short debate about the purpose of business. He gave the pat answer, "Make money." I quoted Peter F. Drucker, "Create jobs." Profits exist as a measure of efficiency and as a surplus to reinvest in operations and training to keep the business competitive - not take the money to Swiss banks and gut the business.

Joseph F. Schumpeter, an economist at Harvard at the start of the 20th century made this argument. Profits exist to reinvest to create more jobs and profits. People needs jobs to live; society has the absolute right to devise any rules it wants to make sure its members live. Drucker recyles Schumpeter.

Germany today in fact follows Schumpeter, and it has the second highest export business in the world - after China. Moreover, its workers receive some of the highest pay and benefits in the world. It is because Germany reinvests the profits into improved operations(equipment, techniques, processes) and training of the workforce and management.

Germany is proof that we need not to be a Third World country to be competitive today and have jobs enough for our people. See the website of David McWilliams, an Irish busineess analyst, writer, for an excellent article on this by him.

Without a profit, you have nor surplus. Without a surplus, you cannot innovate to remain competitive. This writer is totally for profits if we reinvest those profits to stay in business and to create more business. Business is about jobs in the final analysis. The sooner American digest this the sooner we will know how to "set our house in order."

It is not take the money and run.l It is take the money and recycle it into competitive equipment and training.

Thus ends the sermon for today.

Amen.

Dr. Rux

Future of Food Costs

2010-11-13T11:17:00.000-08:00

The Future of Food

The low cost of food in the history of America, which has shaped its economy, is probably coming to an end. Here is why.

Wanda, yes, look for food prices to rise, not fall. Therefore, commodities could be a smart investment, field of work. I am not a financial advisor; however, it is logical. China wants more food. India wants more food. Both China and India are gaining purchasing power. They, and others, will begin to raise the bidding for food. The same process will happen to oil and other commodities.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the fabulous book The Black Swan, the 2007 classic on how chaos theory and complexity theory impact economic behavior, and one of my intellectual heroes, last week that two fields will be growth fields in the coming economic collapse: health care (demographics) and food (commodities).

Yesterday, I told this to an old friend who is now manager of a new health food store here. He is on trend with Taleb. People will eat better to better manage health care costs.

In short, for Americans, the era of low food prices is going to come to an end. More and more of our paychecks, if we have one, will go to purchase necessities.

This is why trend forecasters like Gerald Celente advise their clients to invest in farm land, start their own gardens, and pay close attention to supply and demand dynamics for food.

The Future Economy Belongs to Yin/Yang

2010-11-11T20:00:00.000-08:00

Nathan, the real profit is in the process, the making of a product or service, not its design. Japan taught us this lesson, or at least we could have learned it. For instance, we come up with the design of the copier; Japan copies (no pun) the design and finds a more cost-effective way to produce them - to "fire back" our own R&D at us as a compeititve advantage for them.

Moreover, it is very very hard to replicate, copy processes, and this gives them competitive safety. It is easy to copy blueprint in comparison to processes.

Moreover, we learn how to improve the design of a product, service as we produce it. It is called "lessons learned," or Knowledge Management. As a result, the Japanese, for instance, gain "lessons learned" as they produce a product, which, in turn, allows them to further refine, improve, perfect it to gain competitive advantage. In short, we need to produce at home - locally, which is the opinion of your humble servant here.

Look for this to happen as our currency collapses and we will have to pay more and more debased dollars to purchase foreign goods.

In time, it will become cheaper, more cost-effective to come full circle and making things once again in the USA - and regain the competitive advantage of Knowledge Management.

We have sadly denigrated the making, separate the "head " (design) from the "hand" (production). In fact, our foreign competitors are smarter than this and like Yin/Yang see the need for both design and production in order to function properly. This is a very important point, and thank you for raising it.

The Future of the Work Ethic in America

2010-11-03T21:13:00.000-07:00

There has been much speculation on the causes of the US economy’s reluctance to return to healthy growth: a commercial life which once seemed to hold the secret of eternal expansion now seems to have lost the ability to recover.

My most recent visit inclines me to make an entirely anecdotal and inexpert contribution to this debate. When I was growing up in America – and working my way through university in jobs that involved serving the public – there was a sacred principle of employed life in the US: the customer may not always be right but he is always to be treated as if his needs and desires were paramount. The efficiency, courtesy and helpfulness provided by retail businesses was one of the great hallmarks of American life (and one that made a huge impression on European customers who were accustomed to being treated like grateful supplicants by those who deigned to provide them with any service at all). Over the years of return visits to the US I have noticed a really alarming decline in standards of behaviour and competence: attitudes which would have meant at least a serious warning if not instant sacking a generation ago now seem to go unmonitored and unreformed as a matter of course.

Shopping in New York a week ago, an American friend and I despaired of the uncooperative, unprofessional behaviour of staff in major stores. “It’s like being under water”, observed my friend, commenting on what seemed to be the deliberate slowness of people whose sullen manner reminded me of what it used to be like shopping in London thirty years ago. (When I first arrived here I thought that the dumb insolence of people in shops was directed personally at me as an American. It was a while before I realised that British customers were treated in exactly the same way.)

I do not know what accounts for this change but there are some fairly obvious candidates: politically correct employment policies which demand the hiring of less capable people, anti-employer attitudes encouraged by a school system heavily influenced by Left-liberal ideology, or just the waning of that work ethic which was once so deeply embedded in the American immigrant consciousness.

But whatever the cause, it is sad – and not just for the consumer. Having worked in such jobs myself, I know that the only satisfaction to be had from them comes from carrying them out well. Being forced to maintain standards of performance is not a form of oppression: it is a way of encouraging people to see the worth of what they are doing for a living.
Tags: customer service, New York, US economy

The Future of Democracy in America

2010-11-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

“There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.”

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.”

Democracy has an “ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. . .When the national safety is menace. . .all the great tribunes of democracy. . .convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity.”

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. . . On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Zombie Election - 2010 - USA

2010-10-31T23:54:00.000-07:00

Zombies are persons who are dead and still walking. Moreover, Zombies do not know they are dead.

The 2010 election cycle in the USA is in effect a "Zombie Election." The country is going through the motions of an election cycle. It is walking, holding elections. However,sadly, on too many levels, it is already "dead" and does not know it yet.

Regardless of who wins in the 2010 election cycle in the USA, the econonmic, social, cultural, political toxins at work in the country have in effect killed it. It doesnot matter who wins in the 2010 election cycle. He, she, they are not going to be able to reverse course. For now, the country is no longer able to renew itself.

Nothing is ever won; nothing is every lost.

2010-10-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

Comment on Assignment 7.1

Kandi, your humble servant here has started to study Buddhism to gain peace of mind. In his studies, he has encountered the Buddhist concept of positive/negative, male/female, hot/cold, etc.

Buddhism calls this yin/yang, or to use Newtonian physicans, for action or statement there is an opposite and equal action or statement.

In effect, this is what you have done here. You have balanced both negative and positives. Therefore, there is no positive without a negative side to it; there is no negative side without a positive answer to it. East meets West!

Or as Russell Kirk puts it, nothing is ever won and nothing is ever lost.

We live in a constant tension between winning and losing, or Yin/Yang.

What happens depends on will power.

The future belongs to small and medium-sized countries.

2010-10-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

Ancient Chinese Taoism teaches that small and medium-sized countries in fact are superior to super powers. The super powers simply bully others.

Small and medium-sized countries on the other hand must offer value to other countries, since they are not strong enough to bully other countries.

For example, Canada offers American know-how to other countries without the threats.

Canada also exports food, products, and services in large quantities to the USA. My wife, for example, purchases tomatoes grown in Ontario, Canada here in Wisconsin!

This writer also purchased a snow blower recently at the local Wal-Mart. Yes, it too came from Canada!

The bank down the street just became part of the Bank of Montreal's American subsidiary Harri Bank!

Americans are so busy waging war, bullying others, that they no longer seem to know how to grow tomatoes, build snow blowers, or run banks.

Thus ends our lesson on how ancient Taoism helps to predict our future for today.

World economy starts to decouple from the USA.

2010-10-04T22:44:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Sees World Economy Decoupling From U.S.
By Simon Kennedy - Oct 4, 2010 Wall Street economists are reviving a bet that the global economy will withstand the U.S. slowdown.

Just three years since America began dragging the world into its deepest recession in seven decades, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Credit Suisse Holdings USA Inc. and BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research are forecasting that this time will be different. Goldman Sachs predicts worldwide growth will slow 0.2 percentage point to 4.6 percent in 2011, even as expansion in the U.S. falls to 1.8 percent from 2.6 percent.

Underpinning their analysis is the view that international reliance on U.S. trade has diminished and is too small to spread the lingering effects of America’s housing bust. Providing the U.S. pain doesn’t roil financial markets as it did in the credit crisis, Goldman Sachs expects a weakening dollar, higher bond yields outside the U.S. and stronger emerging-market equities.

“So long as it doesn’t turn to flu, the world can withstand a cold from the U.S.,” Ethan Harris, head of developed-markets economic research in New York at BofA Merrill Lynch, said in a telephone interview. He predicts the U.S. will expand 1.8 percent next year, compared with 3.9 percent globally.

That may provide comfort for some of the central bankers and finance ministers from 187 nations flocking to Washington for annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on Oct. 8-10. IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard last month predicted “positive but low growth in advanced countries,” while developing nations expand at a “very high” rate. He will release revised forecasts on Oct. 6.

‘Partially Decoupled’

“The world has already become partially decoupled,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at New York’s Columbia University, said in a Sept. 20 interview in Zurich. He will speak at an IMF event this week.

Sixteen months after the world’s largest economy emerged from recession, the U.S. recovery is losing momentum, with factory orders falling 0.5 percent in August and unemployment forecast to increase to 9.7 percent in September from the previous month’s 9.6 percent, according to the median estimate of 78 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

Their predictions don’t include another contraction, with growth estimated at 2.7 percent this year and some indicators showing progress. Orders for capital goods rose 5.1 percent in August and the number of contracts to purchase previously owned homes increased 4.3 percent; both were higher than forecasts.

China Manufacturing Accelerates

Even so, emerging markets are showing more strength. Manufacturing in China accelerated for a second consecutive month in September, and industrial production in India jumped 13.8 percent in July from a year earlier, more than twice the June pace.

“It seems that recent economic data help to confirm the story of emerging-markets outperformance,” said David Lubin, chief economist for emerging markets at Citigroup Inc. in London.

The gap in growth rates between the developing and advanced worlds is widening, he said. Emerging economies will account for about 60 percent of global expansion this year and next, up from about 25 percent a decade ago, according to his estimates.

The main reason for the divergence: “Direct transmission from a U.S. slowdown to other economies through exports is just not large enough to spread a U.S. demand problem globally,” Goldman Sachs economists Dominic Wilson and Stacy Carlson wrote in a Sept. 22 report entitled “If the U.S. sneezes...”

Limited Exposure

Take the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. While exports account for almost 20 percent of their gross domestic product, sales to the U.S. compose less than 5 percent of GDP, according to their estimates. That means even if U.S. growth slowed 2 percent, the drag on these four countries would be about 0.1 percentage point, the economists reckon. Developed economies including the U.K., Germany and Japan also have limited exposure, they said.

Economies outside the U.S. have room to grow that the U.S. doesn’t, partly because of its outsized slump in house prices, Wilson and Carlson said. The drop of almost 35 percent is more than twice as large as the worst declines in the rest of the Group of 10 industrial nations, they found.

The risk to the decoupling wager is a repeat of 2008, when the U.S. property bubble burst and then morphed into a global credit and banking shock that ricocheted around the world. For now, Goldman Sachs’s index of U.S. financial conditions signals that bond and stock markets aren’t stressed by the U.S. outlook.

Weaker Dollar

The break with the U.S. will be reflected in a weaker dollar, with the Chinese yuan appreciating to 6.49 per dollar in a year from 6.685 on Oct. 1, according to Goldman Sachs forecasts.

The bank is also betting that yields on U.S. 10-year debt will be lower by June than equivalent yields for Germany, the U.K., Canada, Australia and Norway. U.S. notes will rise to 2.8 percent from 2.52 percent, Germany’s will increase to 3 percent from 2.3 percent and Canada’s will grow to 3.8 percent from 2.76 percent on Oct. 1, Goldman Sachs projects.

Goldman Sachs isn’t alone in making the case for decoupling. Harris at BofA Merrill Lynch said he didn’t buy the argument prior to the financial crisis. Now he believes global growth is strong enough to offer a “handkerchief” to the U.S. as it suffers a “growth recession” of weak expansion and rising unemployment, he said.

Giving him confidence is his calculation that the U.S. share of global GDP has shrunk to about 24 percent from 31 percent in 2000. He also notes that, unlike the U.S., many countries avoided asset bubbles, kept their banking systems sound and improved their trade and budget positions.

Economic Locomotives

A book published last week by the World Bank backs him up. “The Day After Tomorrow” concludes that developing nations aren’t only decoupling, they also are undergoing a “switchover” that will make them such locomotives for the world economy, they can help rescue advanced nations. Among the reasons for the revolution are greater trade between emerging markets, the rise of the middle class and higher commodity prices, the book said.

Investors are signaling they agree. The U.S. has fallen behind Brazil, China and India as the preferred place to invest, according to a quarterly survey conducted last month of 1,408 investors, analysts and traders who subscribe to Bloomberg. Emerging markets also attracted more money from share offerings than industrialized nations last quarter for the first time in at least a decade, Bloomberg data show.

Room to Ease

Indonesia, India, China and Poland are the developing economies least vulnerable to a U.S. slowdown, according to a Sept. 14 study based on trade ties by HSBC Holdings Plc economists. China, Russia and Brazil also are among nations with more room than industrial countries to ease policies if a U.S. slowdown does weigh on their growth, according to a policy- flexibility index designed by the economists, who include New York-based Pablo Goldberg.

“Emerging economies kept their powder relatively dry, and are, for the most part, in a position where they could act countercyclically if needed,” the HSBC group said.

Links to developing countries are helping insulate some companies against U.S. weakness. Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch Group AG and tire maker Nokian Renkaat of Finland are among the European businesses that should benefit from trade with nations such as Russia and China where consumer demand is growing, according to BlackRock Inc. portfolio manager Alister Hibbert.

“There’s a lot of life in the global economy,” Hibbert, said at a Sept. 8 presentation to reporters in London.

Asset Bubbles

The increasing focus on emerging markets may present challenges for their policy makers as the flow of money into their economies risks fanning inflation, asset bubbles and currency appreciation. Countries from South Korea to Thailand have already intervened to weaken their currencies, along with taking steps to restrict capital inflows.

Stephen Roach, nonexecutive Asia chairman for Morgan Stanley, remains skeptical of decoupling. He links the optimism to a snapback in global trade from a record 11 percent slide in 2009. As that fades amid sluggish demand from advanced economies, emerging markets that rely on exports for strength will “face renewed and formidable headwinds,” he said.

“Decoupling is still a dream in much of the developing world,” said Roach, who also teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

‘Year of Recoupling’

The Goldman Sachs economists argue history is on their side. The U.K., Australia and Canada all continued growing amid the U.S. recession of 2001 as the technology-stock bust passed them by, while America’s 2006-2007 housing slowdown inflicted little pain outside its borders, they said. The shift came when the latter morphed into a financial crisis, prompting Goldman Sachs to declare in December 2007 that 2008 would be the “year of recoupling.”

The argument finds favor with Neal Soss, New York-based chief economist at Credit Suisse. While the supply of dollars and letters of credit that fuel international commerce dried up during the turmoil, that isn’t a problem now, so the rest of the world can cope with a weaker U.S., he said.

“Decoupling was a good idea then and is a good idea now,” Soss said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Kennedy at skennedy4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story John Fraher at jfraher@bloomberg.net
.®2010 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The future belongs to the Zombie Class in the USA

2010-10-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

That’s how zombies do it. They take advantage of an easily-corruptible system. Government salaries and benefits, for example, are typically about 30% better than those in the private sector.

You can see the difference here in Bethesda. The houses are all tarted up. The cars are all new and expensive. The streets and restaurants are full. Everything is modern, rich….

The editor of US News & World Report talks of a “great divide” in the US…those who have government salaries…and the rest of us. People who work for government – or otherwise are supported by the government – have made steady income gains over the last 30 years. Others have not. Government employee labor unions have grown while others have declined.

Being a zombie pays. And it’s likely to pay even better in the future. Because now zombies control the White House (it was the zombie states…those that owed the most money…and those that get most money from the government) that elected Barack Obama.

They control the Congress too. Zombies have the time (what else do they have to do?) and the resources (often, direct contact with the government itself) to get involved in elections. They have a motive too – they can pass legislation putting more money in zombie hands.

Military contractors, tax lawyers, “educators” and the handicapped – all have a keen interest in elections. The rest of us have our work, business, families, careers to attend to. Not that every tax lawyer is a chiseler, every military contractor is a cheat, and every person who can’t walk is a malingerer – far from it. But they have to be doubly honest and independent to avoid the corrupting gravity of Planet Zombie.

October 4, 2010

Coming Flight of the Creative Class from the USA

2010-10-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

Annette, in fact, your humble servant is reading a 2007 book by Richard Florida entitled The Flight of the Creative Class. In it, he argues, observes that talent today has many geographic options. America, the USA, is no longer the only destination of talent. Options like Toronto, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand exist, and we in effect are competing now internationally for talent, not just locally. The best talent will not automatically consider the USA its first choice.

This will become a huge issue if and when people are allowd to carry pistols in holsters openly in public in the USA. This is, believe it or not, a key rising political issue in our Madison, Wisconsin area. People are going to public places, e.g. restaurants, with loaded weapons in holsters, and they are claiming a constitutional right to do this in America. If this becomes legal, accepted practice, look for the flight of the creative class from America to become a race for the exits from the USA to other geographic locations that do not allow cowboy antics in the Information Age.

The local politicians here claim to want to bring, create jobs; after saying this, they start pushing public display of loaded weapons! Yoiur humble servant literally heard a candidate for Wisconsin State Senate say this at a dinner last night. Canada, where this writer has options, looks better and better. Your professor is an example of the new creative class who has geographic options and is not place-bound as in the factory, farm age.

This writer has placed an election sign for the opponent of this "gun nut" in his front yard now.

The other danger is the public arming of persons of a certain political persuasion could result in overt violence against persons who disagree with them. Imagine having a political rally and your opponents show up with loaded weapons. It would have a chilling effect on politics and could quickly degenerate into "politics by the gun," not the ballot. This is a very real potential and lethal danger to democratic processes. It is not just the danger of increased, random public violence because of "bad hair days" or drunken feuds in and outside taverns.

The Flight of the Creative Class by Richard Florida sadly sounds a warning about the future loss of critical human resources from the USA if this trend toward Wild West gun-slinging takes root.

The future belongs to the vulgar in the US.

2010-09-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

The Nation's Pulse
Debasement Is Not Just a Damp Room Under Your House
By Michael Johnson on 9.21.10 @ 6:08AM

When I opened my Sunday New York Times to a story on Derek Jeter this week I was stumped from the first word. I had to ask my daughter to define OMG. "I use it all the time," she said. "Where have you been?"

"Oh my God," I reminded her. "In France."

Visitors, foreign and American-born, are finding communication increasingly difficult as catchwords proliferate. Often they seem to come from the schoolyard.

Just how debased can the English language become and still be called English? I pondered this question as I attempted to function in the U.S. after living an extended period in Europe.

The day before my OMG experience, an angry motorist in Boston wanted to share his opinion of my driving skills. He held up his right hand to his forehead and formed an "L" with his thumb and index finger extended. "Loser," my 12-year-old grandson translated. As I grumbled unintelligibly, my grandson held up three fingers and rotated his hand to the left. The "W" became an "E", shorthand for "whatever."

I assume American adults will be doing the "whatever" sign to each other eventually, just as they picked up the l-word. ("Whatever" as a spoken word regrettably seems here to stay.)

Kids used to borrow language from adults. Now the opposite is happening. Is this country regressing?

The last time I paid attention to the American vernacular, "awesome" (from "awe": reverential fear or wonder) was a rather cute grownup word tossed around on the playground to describe fast rope-skipping and such. Now I see it is common currency among real estate agents, the military, doctors, NASCAR commentators, and even the ethereal voices of NPR. I heard one smug woman the other day interviewing a minor author. "You new novel is awesome," she purred. He purred back. I thought, "Whatever."

"Awesome" has the British laughing at us again. One Londoner wrote on the web recently that it is "a word Americans use to describe everything." What we have here is a trend I'll call double reverse migration, or the snatching of a children's word by adults after it had first been snatched by the kids.

Some adults are still stymied by these two syllables, though. A junior executive friend of mine recently received a herogram from her boss -- a woman comfortably salaried in the middle six figures -- that consisted of one word: "AWSUM!"

Part of American lingo creep is normal in a healthy language, and some of it can be fun. I won't deal here with Sarah Palin's formulations, the Twitter or texting crowd, fashion patios, tech talk or satellite radio. Eventually someone will do the book.

The list of neologisms and vulgarisms will be long. What is a visitor to make of words like "diss" meaning to trash, "sick" meaning excellent, "rad" meaning even better and "wicked" (at least in New England) meaning best? They don't teach this stuff in ESL classes.

People who work with words are alarmed by slippage into vocabulary that was once over the line in mixed company. Try late-night television, where boundaries of propriety are steadily moving outward. Those of us who can remember Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" are appalled at Jay Leno's monotonous sexual innuendo and the sprinkling in the monologue of "hells" and "damns" and worse. The FCC used to police abuse of the public airwaves, threatening license problems for those who overstepped. Come back Newton Minnow.

And what are we to make of a publishing industry that brings out family-oriented titles such as 'The Big-Ass Book of Crafts" and "The Big-Ass Book of Home Decor"?

Okay, I'm confused. I admit it. Isn't "Kick-Ass," a major movie, a vulgar title? And how to explain that the very preppy population of Wellesley, near once-uptight Boston, seemed unperturbed when Kickass Cupcakes ("Think about cupcakes in a new way") moved into their tranquil town of McMansions and rolling lawns? Or the randy boys at Boston University who enjoy autumn girl-watching on Massachusetts Avenue, known as Mass Ave, or more familiarly as "Ass Ave."

Some proper households are on edge. My daughter gasped when her 12-year-old interjected a "WTF?" into dinnertable conversation. "Chill, mom," he said. "It means 'Why the face?'"

Whatever.

Michael Johnson spent 17 years at McGraw-Hill, including six years as a news executive in New York. He now writes from Bordeaux in France.

Taosim and the Future

2010-09-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

Ted, I read Chinese Taoism, a philosophy that is 2600 years old now.

Taoism talks about empty space.

Joseph Schumpeter the economist in the 1920's called it "creative destruction."

For the new to start, we must get rid of the old.

We need to create space for the new.

As you suggest, the USA is moving in this direction. What was is collapsing.

If we are true to our heritage we will seize the open space that results to create new products and services.

Taoists see the future as an uncarved block of wood. We are the carvers.

Is there an adult culture in the future of America?

2010-09-06T19:18:00.000-07:00

William, I have outlined in red your opening paragraph because it is very exciting! Here is why.

Yesterday, I heard Charlie Rose interview Ken Auleta on cable TV. Auleta has just published a book entitled Googled.

While discussing the book, Auleta informed Rose that the founders and top management of Google had to hire “adult coaches” to teach them how to behave like adults in the workplace!

In short, the adolescent work culture of Google and other organizations like it is coming to an end. We have to grow up – or sink.

Morris Schechtmann, who wrote Working Without a Net, observed that the average American does not reach emotional maturing until age forty today! Auleta documented it!

This is one of the reasons for outsourcing to other countries.

We must blame ourselves and our permissive, undisciplined, adolescent schools for this looming disaster.

I share this because you may want to include some research on this as part of your topic. It is very timely and important!

The Future of Education - if any - According to Taoism

2010-09-03T11:28:00.001-07:00

Here is a Taoist insight that I discovered yesterday.

You cannot get from 1 to 4 without 2 and 3.

In other words, you cannot go from beginner 1 to expert 4 without mastering the skills and ethics of 2 and 3.

This is exactly what most students with entitlement mindsets expect to do today, go from 1 to 4 without 2 and 3.

Education in the future without 2 and 3 in effect is 0 - a negative drain on resources.

Gerald Celente describes USA in 2012.

2010-09-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine.

Trends Expert Gerald Celente is also known as Dr Doom and the Nostradamus of Modern Times , Gerald Celente is regarded as one of the foremost trend predictors in the world. This author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking, and publisher of The Trends Journal, is frequently a guest on television news and talk show programs. The New York Post said "if Nostradamus were alive today, he'd have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente."

Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

“We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas….we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place….putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression”.

“America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente, noting that people’s refusal to acknowledge that America was even in a recession highlights how big a problem denial is in being ready for the true scale of the crisis.

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent.

The consequence of what we have seen unfold this year would lead to a lowering in living standards, Celente predicted a year ago, which is also being borne out by plummeting retail sales figures.

The prospect of revolution was a concept echoed by a British Ministry of Defence report last year, which predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”

In a separate recent interview, Celente went further on the subject of revolution in America.

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”

“It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”

“We’re going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It’s going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It’s going to come as a shock and with it, there’s going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people’s minds weren’t wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

Canada sets stage for VAT in the USA

2010-08-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Business News from Canada

My wife and I just returned form our three-week visit to Ontario, Canada. It was great. We always learn through comparison and the many wonderful people we meet.

To our surprise, the federal government of Canada passed a 13% national sales tax on all goods, services across the entire country in July of this year. It was sticker shock for us, although we travel to Toront on average twice yearly.

The vendors, e.g. our motel managers, were reeling from the added costs and unhappy about the tax. Protests were starting in British Columbia, but we could not find out from anybody why the government passed this huge increase.

Here are some thoughts. 1) It needed the money to sustain its bloated bureaucracies. 2) It needed the money to keep the country in the "black" and not destroy its currency, which ranks now with the Swiss franc for value.

Your humble servant here can live with reason 2.

In addition, he mentioned to the different Canadians with whom he discussed the tax that we in the US are facing a similar national VAT (value added tax) to prop up the regime on Wall Street and its related partners in Washington. This is why I am sharing this piece of information with you. We still have time to weigh the merits of such a tax increase, if any.

Dr. Rux (M.A., Canadian History, University of Toronto)

America in 2017

2010-07-31T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Year America Dissolved

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
July 28, 2010

It was 2017. Clans were governing America.

Clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Photo: A scene from the 1997 film, The Postman.

The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.

As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.
The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.

With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.

The government was forced to print money in order to pay its bills, causing domestic prices to rise rapidly. Faced with hyperinflation, Washington took recourse in terminating Social Security and Medicare and followed up by confiscating the remnants of private pensions. This provided a one-year respite, but with no more resources to confiscate, money creation and hyperinflation resumed.

Organized food deliveries broke down when the government fought hyperinflation with fixed prices and the mandate that all purchases and sales had to be in US paper currency. Unwilling to trade appreciating goods for depreciating paper, goods disappeared from stores.

Washington responded as Lenin had done during the “war communism” period of Soviet history. The government sent troops to confiscate goods for distribution in kind to the population. This was a temporary stop-gap until existing stocks were depleted, as future production was discouraged. Much of the confiscated stocks became the property of the troops who seized the goods.

• Goods reappeared in markets under the protection of local warlords. Transactions were conducted in barter and in gold, silver, and copper coins.
Other clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Uneasy alliances formed to balance differences in clan strengths. Betrayals quickly made loyalty a necessary trait for survival.

Large scale food and other production broke down as local militias taxed distribution as goods moved across local territories. Washington seized domestic oil production and refineries, but much of the government’s gasoline was paid for safe passage across clan territories.

Most of the troops in Washington’s overseas bases were abandoned. As their resource stocks were drawn down, the abandoned soldiers were forced into alliances with those with whom they had been fighting.

Washington found it increasingly difficult to maintain itself. As it lost control over the country, Washington was less able to secure supplies from abroad as tribute from those Washington threatened with nuclear attack. Gradually other nuclear powers realized that the only target in America was Washington. The more astute saw the writing on the wall and slipped away from the former capital city.

When Rome began her empire, Rome’s currency consisted of gold and silver coinage. Rome was well organized with efficient institutions and the ability to supply troops in the field so that campaigns could continue indefinitely, a monopoly in the world of Rome’s time.

When hubris sent America in pursuit of overseas empire, the venture coincided with the offshoring of American manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs and the corresponding erosion of the government’s tax base, with the advent of massive budget and trade deficits, with the erosion of the fiat paper currency’s value, and with America’s dependence on foreign creditors and puppet rulers.

The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight.
Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun.

America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many.
Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed.

Globalism had run its course. Life reformed on a local basis.

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist who served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is published widely in the alternative media, including Infowars.com, and is a frequent guest on the Alex Jones Show. Dr. Roberts’ latest book is How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds.
—

Future of American Edu-Ma-Cation

2010-07-20T19:55:00.001-07:00

I will not share this. It is confidential between us. I thank you for your honest opinion.

What is going to happen according to MIT economist Lester Thurow in his 1995 study The Future of Capitalism predicts employers are going to look for hard certifications in specific skills. For example, a degree in accounting will have no value without a C.P.A. certification. This will happen in all fields of study. The reason is collapsing standards. Employers no longer knoe what a degree means in too many cases, and as a result they are going to look for hard certification testing to verify skills.

Also, in time, superior academics will not look for careers in academics, but they will move into other fields, e.g. business, where they get an adequate return on their hard work to earn hard degrees.

Last year a university fired me for expecting students to do homework! Yes, teachers are let go because students do not want to do homework. It is easier to replace teachers than to replace tuition; it is about tuition now in far too many cases, not learning. The place that fired me now wants me back because it needs my credentials to keep its accreditation. Can you imagine! You throw a person overboard and six months later you want him or her to crawl back.

We measure up or we measure down. Or, as I put it, duty is missing as a concept in our culture, values, today. Duty means there is something bigger than self and it underscores what I owe this greater entity. Measuring up to standards is an example.

Rights, on the other hand, focus on what I get. Duty means you must give, and rights mean you get. Entitlement of academic grades without study is an example.

A society obsessed with rights, getting instead of duty giving, will sooner or later destroy itself. Our society is out of balance. Our degenerate educational systems is an example.

Winston S. Churchill observed duty is the greatest word in the human language for it reminds us that we are not the center, be-all and end-all of the human race. We have value, God-given value, of course, but we also cannot expect to simply take without giving. We in the end cannot expect to learn something without studying. Input is required in order to get output.

In fact, we owe a duty to the society that supports and protects us as helpless infants and children. This duty means we do not expect something for nothing, rights without duties. No society can endure such an entitlement mentality and systematic parasitic behavior.

Sadly, this is the condition of America in 2010. The coming Greatest Depression is going to remove the surplus wealth that has allowed this wholesale getting something for nothing behavior. It is going to be a different world shortly.

The Future is up to us today.

2010-05-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

Trend forecasters, here is the conclusion to Lori's assignment 4.3.

It reminds us that in the final analysis the future depends on human effort.

Trend forecasters can provide insight into possible and probable options, but they are the first to admit that what is plausible, likely to happen, must be the result of human action or inaction.

It is, in short, up to us. Lori reminds us of this important facet of trend forecasting below:

The responsibility of using these trends lies among community residents, community leaders, environmentalists and industrial constituents to ensure the possibility that these trends can ensure progress for tomorrow’s generation.

Thank you, Lori!

The Decline of Business Civilization

2010-05-26T21:33:00.000-07:00

Dale, I just read Robert Heilbroner's classic "The Decline of Business Civilization." He wrote it in 1976.

In it he predicted a society, country, civilization that reduces everything and everybody to the value of money - without any other worth - will destroy itself.

In such a society, vampires will pursue money regardless of the costs to the rest of the society.

He predicted that in 100 years from 1976 this trend would cause business civilization, including America's business civilization, to collapse and rewire itself again around more healthy values.

Heilbroner saw the future!

We are living the results of greed and the poisons it has released in our society.

We are moving toward the time when we are going to be willing to "reset" our values to restore concepts like honor, honesty, ethics.

Future of Time in China and America

2010-05-25T23:08:00.001-07:00

TIME AS CAPITAL

How is it that Asia has had a huge trade surplus with the United States? Because its people work long hours. They are finally getting access to capital. This capital increases their productivity. The tools they need to compete are made available through thrift. Then they put capital to use in a long work week. They have little time for leisure. They are at work many hours per day.

In contrast, Americans are losing capital through consumer debt and withdrawal from the labor force. I don't mean unemployed people. I mean underemployed people. The person who watches TV for 4 hours a day is consuming his most precious capital: time.

When we see a society committed to work, we see a society that has the basis for economic growth. If people work hard to get ahead, they will accumulate capital. Their work will become more efficient. If they work merely to buy spare time for play, then they will not experience economic growth.

Asia is growing economically, because of the people's future-orientation. The United States is barely growing, because of its present-orientation. We see this in the waste of time associated with entertainment. This is a culture-wide phenomenon. It has been accelerating in the West for at least 85 years. The rise of radio and the movies marked the transition. World War II delayed the advent of the entertainment culture. The 1950s produced the first teenage subculture. It had its own movies, music, and entertainment. Why? Disposable income from parents and part-time jobs. The money went into our pockets. That was my generation. We spent as children spend, but we spent more money than children ever had spent in history. We got used to entertainment. The counter-culture, 1965–70, was even more committed to entertainment. It even turned cultural revolution into entertainment.

This happened all over the West. It was not a uniquely American phenomenon. The student revolt in France in 1968 was worse than anywhere else.

We now live in a nation that has suffered capital consumption. Foreigners are providing capital for us. Asians buy something like 40% of Treasury debt sold to the public. This will not go on indefinitely.

When we learned to waste time and money in our youth, we developed bad habits. These bad habits are not easily broken. Asians never developed these bad habits. The youth of Asia headed for the cities to get jobs, not entertainment.

CONCLUSION

Once China's real estate bubble has popped, it will be time to move capital into the region that is committed to future-orientation. These people are not just hard workers. They are not merely high-return workers when given capital. They are uniquely future-oriented. This is new to Asia. It is part of the Western influence: Fabian socialism in India and Marxism in China. Both systems limit economic growth, but they are both linear and highly future-oriented: the kingdom of central planning society. When central planning is abandoned because of its inefficiency, the concept of linear history remains.

This shift from West to East is not going to be reversed without something like a religious transformation in the West. Asia is adopting the West's concept of linear time. Meanwhile, the West is abandoning it: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

Do not put all of your capital in shares of a sinking ship.

May 26, 2010

Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 2

The Future of Law in the West

2010-05-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

The other day, upholding the sacking of a black Christian for declining to provide “sex therapy lessons” to gay couples, Lord Justice Laws ruled that “law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds is irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary.” Actually it’s the law of Lord Justice Laws that is increasingly “irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary.” Or as George Orwell, in Animal Farm, formulated it: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. In the land of Laws, a gay is more equal than a Christian. A Muslim is more equal than anybody. A black man is more equal than a white man, unless the white man is gay and the black man a Christian. An eco-zealot is more equal than an Anglican. Not long before Lord Justice Laws’ decision on the “irrationality” of legal protection for Christianity, Tim Nicholson, a “Head of Sustainability” fired for questioning his property management group’s environmental policies, sued for wrongful dismissal under “Employment Equality (Religion And Beliefs) Regulations.” He wound up with the best part of one hundred thousand pounds after Mr. Justice Burton ruled that Mr. Nicholson’s faith in anthropogenic global warming was a “philosophical belief” on a par with religion. So the Employment Equality (Religion And Beliefs) Law protects belief in apocalyptic “climate change” but not in Jesus.

Richard Florida on America's Immediate Future

2010-05-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

I am literally listening to Richard Florida, author of the bestseller "The Rise of the Creative Class" on Coast to Coast AM radio.

In his new book, "The Great Reset," he makes the following trend forecasts:

1. Our economy will lose another 1 million blue-collar jobs.

2. Our economy will add another 7.5 million well-paying jobs over the next ten years in the following areas:

Business management

New technology

Healthcare

Education

3. Our economy will add another 7.5 million jobs over the next ten years in minimum-wage jobs like food services and home healthcare.

Florida argues we must boost the pay of this lower half or we shall end up with a "divided economy."

In this he echoes the late Peter F. Drucker who argued that a central challenge in our economy is providing dignity to such jobs.

Florida and Drucker see the same challenge. If or how we meet it is still ours choice.

I have ordered his latest book. When my wife and I are next in Toronto, I plan to visit with him. He teaches at the University of Toronto now, from which I hold a M.A.

Florida also predicts tension with China over natural resources. As China's economy grows in strength, it will need more and more natural resources to satisfy the rising expectations of its population.

Florida predicts China's first move will be into Africa in order to gain control of its natural resources.

I love trend forecasting! It is never boring!

The Future of Management - Project Management

2010-05-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

Rene, I am sharing my reply to a student in another course. This person works for Dupont.

The discussion is about the use of Six Sigma. Note, however, the use of project management throughout the Dupont system as described in the message below!

What unites these project managers is their skills in Six Sigma. Whether the project manager comes from inside or outside Dupont, Dupont can count on the project manager to have the same basic skills, mindsets, approaches. As a result, it is easier to outsource managerial tasks!

It struck me that this really applies to your interest in free agents.

The future of management is going to be project management. We will lead a project, and then we will follow a project manager. We will not always be manager, leader.

Dupont anticipates this trend.

Managers will behave like artists who develop portfolios of their work, achievements. They will shop these portfolios like resumes internally or externally to organizations.

Therefore it is terribly important for all of us to document our achievements.

Yes, it is a new world!

--------------------

Gregory, this is very, very impressive! This is the most thorough deployment of Six Sigma to come to my attention.

What strikes me also is the project management approach to management. It is the model for management in the future. It also opens the organization to outsourcing project managers as needed. What provides continuity between internal and external project management is the toolbox and culture of Six Sigma! This is a great insight!

-------------------

At DuPont, Six Sigma is executed by training and deploying Champions and Belts for each project. The Process Owner, who also takes on some Six Sigma responsibilities in addition to their job, is the person or manager responsible for the specific process on which a Six Sigma project is focused on improving. Champions, whose chief role is to clear barriers that get in the way of a project, create the support structure for that improvement. “The champion can be defined as a person in a company’s organization who 'champions' a Six Sigma project. It can be used more specifically to refer to a senior manager who champions the project, ensures that it is properly resourced, and uses their authority to overcome organizational barriers” (Murray, 2010).

At a higher level, an SBU (Strategic Business Unit) Champion provides strategy, consultation, guidance, and support to the Project Champion. DuPont created a Top-Line Growth Champion, whose role is to identify opportunities, and promote and facilitate Six Sigma projects targeted to improve revenue for the business.

At the execution level, Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Green Belts drive Six Sigma. The Master Black Belt mentors individual Black Belts and trains others on Six Sigma methodology. “The major function of a master black belt is teaching. They train, measure and observe six sigma managers, and also act as a consultant for six sigma projects” (Fulton, 2010). The Master Black Belt also works with the Project Champion and SBU, and helps both in identifying new projects.

The Future of the Cell Phone

2010-05-04T18:37:00.000-07:00

Carl, I worked with a doctoral student earlier this year.

He is in charge of food distribution for 145,000 refugees in Burundi, Africa! He had this problem. He could not track his supply chain of food distribution.

As a result, people were stealing food to sell, and the refugees were going hungry. He wanted to fix this. His proposed solution was using the cell phone as a supply chain "computer."

First, it is cheaper in poor countries to use cell towers than to string fiber optic phone lines.

Second, as you suggest, information services are converging on the cell phone or similar devices - and away from the PC and laptop!

In fact, courses like this could easily come to you over the cell phone in the not too distant future!

Anyway, I encouraged my student to go to the Gates Foundation for funding. He offers two interests of theirs: technology and health in the Third World.

I am pleased to have done my little bit to help this situation.

Dr. Rux

Water Wars

2010-04-08T21:40:00.001-07:00

Debbi, your research paper on the growing shortage of potable (drinkable) water on earth is very important. We likely will have water wars in the future. For instance, the Southwest of the USA has no water. How much are we in Wisconsin willing to let them drain off our water tables and the Great Lakes? Your humble servant here would send none, unless the end-users of the water paid for it, good and hard. Water is more valuable than oil in the long run. Also, Canada is fearful of our tapping into its water resources - for free or at low cost. The Pentagon in fact has done "war gaming" scenarios and strategies on how we will respond to this growing shortage of potable water with armed force.

"Will we ever be able to solve the worlds water problem is something that every nation should be working on. The problem is world wide, not just here in the United States. In years to come everyone is going to have a foreseeable water problem and we, as a nation, should be working to solve this problem now so in the future we do not have to worry about where our water is coming from. The generations that are coming after us deserve a solution to this problem and it is our responsibility to make sure that they have one. Clean water for everyone is a necessity; not a luxury."

Canada, USA, Israel, Iran, War, Offshore USA Oil

2010-03-31T20:58:00.000-07:00

The danger of the USA and Israel going to war with Iran in the near future became very real March 30-31, 2010 with the following two, connected announcements.

1) Canada yesterday announced the withdrawal of its coalition soldiers from Afghanistan. The mass news media in the USA has not carried this decision.

2) President Obama announced suddenly today that we are now going to drill oil in formerly restricted offshore areas. This counters his campaign promises and alienates part of his base.

The timing of the two messages is this.

1. Canada does not want to be on the ground in Afghanistan when war spreads to Iran, so it finds itself at war with a country that has not harmed it.

2. The USA put Iran on notice that we do not need its oil if we go to war with it.

The fallout will include the following:

1. The military draft will return to the USA.

2. Terrorism against the USA will escalate inside and outside the USA.

3. Distraction of the American people from the economic Depression on its way.

We are closer to danger today, March 31, 2010 than most Americans realize.

Future of Higher Education in the USA

2010-03-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

The Bubble Must Burst

Despite the systemic redirection of wealth from its most productive uses to the fantasies of academics and central planners, cracks are appearing on the surface of higher education. The bubble is not sustainable. Too many students attend school without good reason; too many jobs are held by too many highly paid teachers; too many programs are wasting money and time. Sorting out which are economically viable and which need to be liquidated is something that only a system of prices, established through voluntary exchange, can establish.

Even if universities are immune from having to please consumers, their customers (students) are not. In many cases – especially in the liberal arts, Mr. Leiter's field – earning a degree no longer pays off for the average graduate, and the increasing average rate of student-loan debt puts liberal-arts majors at a big disadvantage early in their careers. Many with bachelor's or even master's degrees are taking jobs that require no more than a high-school education. States themselves are increasingly unable to afford the cost of their patronage of higher learning.

At some point, institutions will need to reckon with reality and plan their own budgets accordingly. Along the way, private institutions that excel in education – not to mention taxpayers – will suffer, as state institutions continue to receive special consideration at the public trough.

What are colleges and universities to do? They will have to assess their current standing and find ways of consolidating their losses, in order to ensure that the most urgent needs of the institution are met and (if possible) provide for the survival of the school. But they face a dilemma: much of their payroll expenses are in the form of guaranteed jobs for life. They have been living beyond their means for years, relying on increasingly leveraged investments and public subsidies to keep the party going.

Their unrealistic promises and financial habits have put them in a bind: they must remove the dead weight, but they cannot simply eliminate their least-valued positions (as every other nongovernmental institution has been forced to do by the recession). Because of the public status of most schools, there are few market signals they can rely on to make their decision, and whatever they decide will spark further outrage. It seems as though everyone loses on the deal.

How Long Can the Façade Last?

Mr. Leiter might be right, for now: the first schools that begin to face reality and cut back on staff will indeed face the scorn of the entirety of academia. There is no fair way to cut back on jobs when you have promised everyone a tenured position. Some qualified people who have dedicated themselves to your school will lose out.

There remains among many scholars an air of entitlement and invincibility. Many professors believe themselves to be among the least appreciated members of white-collar society and above "capitalist" concerns of profit and loss. But King's College, London and the state schools in California are merely the first fruits of a collapsing system – and notably one that has made us all poorer in the meantime. In recent weeks there have been an increasing number of schools who are considering or taking KCL-like action. Because of the problems created by the tenure system, the restructuring of these schools is guaranteed to be much more painful than it would otherwise have been.

The inevitable collapse – and the moral outrage of those it hurts – will continue for as long as the public buys into the myth that higher education (and its professors) are too important to have to keep their costs and production in line with consumer demand.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory and Organizations

2010-03-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

John, I am a fan of Chaos Theory and Complexity.

In these theories, systems self-organize.

This is the future of Organizational Development, Leadership and Management.

The discussion of Leadership and Management today is dated.

Leadership and Management, as discussed today, in effect are external to the system. They act on it from the "outside in."

Self-organization of Chaos Theory and Complexity is internal to the system. They act on it from the "inside out."

Chaos and Complexity ought to inform the research, practice of how to nurture systems now.

The Future of Management

2010-03-08T18:55:00.000-08:00

John, the problem with traditional approaches to learning organizations is the assumption of tenure of employment.

In the "old days" workers would be around long enough to provide ROI, return on investment, in upgrading their skills, knowledge.

It may be that the "learning organization" ought to focus more on Knowledge Management, the capture of "lessons learned" from implementing processes and project than on the traditional Training and Development model of skilling.

Let the contract workers invest in their own skills.

Then, capture the learning synergy they provide on the job as they interact with others.

This kind of Knowledge Management shifts the cost of training to the "free agent" worker, away from the employer, but at the same time, Knowledge Management captures the results of the interaction of this knowledge with the organization, project, process, etc.

In other words, the employers will "steal" knowledge from their hires.

This is how the enterprise will learn, but it will not be a two-way street in which the employer provides investment in the skills, knowledge base of the contract hires.

On the other hand, free agents can also "turn the tables" and work long enough for employers to "steal" their knowledge!

The breakdown of the traditional "social contract" of loyalty in the workplace is going to rewrite the rules of organizational development away from Training and Development toward Knowledge Management.

Dr. Rux

The Future of Government in the USA

2010-01-27T21:39:00.001-08:00

In history, there is a classic debate about the foundation of government. Here it is.

1. Physical force - Thomas Hobbes pointed out that government rests on the capacity to inflict pain and death, physical force. It is as simple as a gunfight in the Old West. Whoever shoots fastest, straightest is in charge.

2. Reason - John Locke argues in fact government is the result of reasonable agreements among humans to create governments to proect their lives, property, pursuit of happiness, etc. The result is our U.S. Constitution, a legal contract, and it reflects the impact of lawyers who come in swarms with commercial societies that need contracts to do business.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was a lawyer. However, it was George Washington who fought the war, applied the force, to make independence for our country concrete. Gettysburg is another example of how the view of Hobbes, in the final analysis, settles affairs and provides the foundation for governments.

Both Hobbes and Locke lived at the time of the English Civil War, 1641-1648. Hobbes observed brute force in the process. Locke saw struggle for contractual government in the process.

I have seen the writings of Hobbes literally under glass in the British National Museum in London. He is not popular today, because we do not like to face his scenario of what we are.

However, when our police, courts, and prisons refuse to put fear into the predators on the rest of us through measures like capital punishment, good and hard, surely and swiftly, we are going to pay the price of following John Locke's line of thinking. At some point, we will get tough or we shall surely collapse. Hobbes by the way restates the Roman view of things too.

The Future of Canada

2010-01-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

The Maple Leaf Forever – Paul Rux, Ph.D.

Ramsay Cook, a professor of Canadian history at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, gave a series of guest lectures at Harvard University on Canadian-American relations.

Cook, in fact, argued for American empire, because as long as America is fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. it has little time and energy left to mess with Canada!

While the American cat is away the Canadian mouse can play!

Cook argues when America reaches the limits of its capacity to mess with other countries, it will start to return its focus homeward, which will make America dangerous to Canada, for it is on our doorstep.

Cook pointed out how the Romans reached limits of expansion when they ran into German tribes along the Rhine River. Cook believes America is going to reach such limits to expansion, also, good and hard.

Your professor by the way earned a M.A. in Canadian History from the University of Toronto; this has provided him with a unique perspective on America. It helps him to step outside our media bubbles and to gain perspectives from a "distance."

I share Ramsay Cook because he provides a highly creative insight into our American history as it may impact his country. He also draws comparisons with Rome, which seem to fit.

His lectures at Harvard subsequently appeared in a book entitled "The Maple Leaf Forever."

- Dr. Rux

Future of Supply Chain Risk Management

2010-01-04T18:48:00.000-08:00

Outsourcing relates to supply chain planning, stability, reliability.

Energy costs can crash supply chains overnight. We cannot assume perpetual stability in global supply chains.

In fact, conflicts, wars, terrorism, etc. can emerge by surprise to undermine outsourcing. Nobody wants to talk about this.

For example, if there is a wider war in the Middle East look for the price of oil to skyrocket overnight. In turn, outsourcing, which is part of supply chain management, comes unglued.

If you do not like the idea of the relationships of outsourcing to workforce readiness, you may want to explore risk management of supply chains, or outsourcing to use another work for supply chains, today. This is also a huge topic waiting for research.

Risk management for planning and managing logistics ought to position you to be a leader in this field and an expert in great demand.

Supply chain risk management, moreover, does not duplicate the work done already on the political, social, and economic impacts of outsourcing.

Do something new, fresh, and badly needed!

The Future of Education in the USA - if any

2010-01-04T18:34:00.000-08:00

Henry, welcome to our course, and, yes, Happy New Year! I look forward to working with you. Here are some thoughts about outsourcing.

Last fall, I heard the VP of Johnson Controls at a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He said, "We locate production where we can find a quality workforce, which has hard skills and a work ethic."

He did not say his company located production because of taxes, wages, benefits, infrastructure like roads, or finances. He said his company locates production because of the workforce, its quality as measured in terms of "hard skills" and an equally "hard" work ethic.

As Peter F. Drucker argued, "Plan the people first, and the people will plan the business." In the Knowledge Economy, people, not physical plant, drive enterprises. To have a winning business you must have winning people.

Sadly, as Peter Drucker points out in his last book, 2004, the U.S. now requires business to spend 25% of its budget for management on affirmative action compliance. Other countries do not impose the cost of "social engineering" on its businesses; this reduces their operational costs.

Moreover, they do not hire on the basis of "diversity" or some other quota. Instead, they hire people who have hard skills and an equally hard work ethic.

In short, nobody talks about the poor quality of the American workforce today. We like to think low wages drive economic decisions. Hard skills and an equally hard work ethic drive economic decisions today; nobody is willing to explore this in detail.

In other words, if you want to stop outsourcing, look at yourself. Are you worth what you think you are in the marketplace? How do we restore standards to education, yes, this is a matter of education, that demand hard skills and a hard work ethic?

The time for letting psycho-babble run our K-12 school systems and "social promotion" at all levels for tuition is coming to an end. Outsourcing in fact is a mirror on American education, top to bottom.

You may not be popular if you pursue this topic; it is begging for somebody to research it "good and hard."

The Future of Globalism

2009-11-27T23:43:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was in the business library of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, my alma mater, three times over. I was searching for current books on global business strategy.

As I reviewed the various titles, it dawned on me that in fact globalism may be reaching its limits. Here is why.

If the cost of oil rises, and there are strong indications it will, there will be a breakdown in low-cost transportation on which the global economy depends.

Gerald Celente, and other trend forecasters, argues that we are going to move into "local" production of products and services, and away from globalism.

Globalism is a mantra. How does it align with current trends in energy prices?

Think Warren Buffet. He recently purhcased a huge railroad system because he is betting on a spike in oil prices and a collapse of trucking in its wake. This means it will be more economical to produce locally than to transport globally.

Trend forecasting challenges assumptions. It is an assumption that globalism will contine to trend into the future.

I shared these thoughts with the young man who checked out my book selections. It really caught his attention. He, too, is now reflecting on the viability of globalism as an ongoing trend.

Butterflies Create the Future!

2009-11-24T18:10:00.000-08:00

The "Butterfly Effect," based on the Theory of Complex Numbers, a MIT insight, says innovation, change occur on the edges of organizations, societies, not at their centers.

MIT mathematical models - and human history - in fact prove this can be and is the case.

The center is dead. It resists change. Think Washington, D.C.

The periphery, the edge, however, is fluid in comparison with the center, where vested interests raise the ante against whatever is not under its control.

As a result, the periphery, the edge, is where change can occur most easily. The concentrations of vested power at the center have not "sucked up all of the oxygen (resources)" at the edge.

In other words, the center is not looking for and does not value statistical "outliers." The forces focused at and on the center are too busy getting and keeping turf.

Once change, an"outlier," takes place on or at the edge, the periphery, it creates, in efffect, a pilot study, a proof of concept, an example, a model.

It says, "boys and girls," the concept is not just a pipe dream, talk, paper plan. It is real; it is working right over here.

Peter F. Drucker, the late, great management genius, argues that these "butterflies" change the frameworks of discussion.

Now discussions more and more must factor in the proof of concept. The result is forward movement, not costly stagnation and degeneration.

More and more, your humble servant, this writer, believes it is a waste of time to try to change processes at the center. Witness the present healthcare debacle in America as a prime example.

We have the best scope and hope for healthcare innovation and reform at the state and local levels, away from the huge, vested, vampire interests at the center in Washington, D.C.

"The "Butterfly Effect" is one of the reasons why this writer, your humble servant, more and more rejects the obsession of American culture with leadership.

Instead of some "savior on a white horse," let folks self-organize. The result will be more improvement, innovation, and return on investment, insead of dashed hopes and con games.

The "obscure butterflies" on the edges or periphery of society will not waste more precious time and resources on tyring to keep alive the old highly-centralized, dysfunctional industrial model of doing things at the center.

We are in fact witness to the collapse of this centralized model for managing human affairs. Call it "creative destruction," to borrow from Joseph F. Schumpter. "Butterflies" will fill the vacuum.

We can create and move cost-effective, profitable, responsive enterprises to the periphery of society easily now because of the power and logic of networking technologies.

We could be on the verge of freeing up resources at the center to create new systems at the edge, if we come to our senses and stop trying to shore up the brain-dead center.

If we have a humane future, "butterflies" - not leaders - will create it.

The Future of More

2009-11-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

Would you like to have some fun? Here's how. The next time you meet a legislator ask him or her the following question: What are you prepared to cut?

As a rule, he or she will stand there, mute, with vacant eyes, like a duck hit in the head with a hammer. It has never, ever danwed on our political class with "power of the purse" that we could - and are - reaching a point when there is no longer "more." In fact, there is going to be a whole lot less.

However, when you routinely spend the money of other people to buy votes and legislative perks for yourself, the concepts of "less" has no value. Enter "more, and more, and more, and more."

We think of legislators and other members of the political class as glib. They are never at a loss for words until you ask them: What are you prepared to cut? This question puts them on the old "spot." It is fun to watch them squirm. It is also pathetic.

A newsman once asked Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), an early American labor leader, what unions wanted. "More!" was his emphatic answer. This "mantra of more" now drives our political class and our public business, or what is left of it. It is also driving us over an economic cliff to disaster.

Here is a reality check. There is no more. There is going to be a lot less. Our legislators need to get used to this reality and act accordingly. Otherwise, thy will totally destroy what is left of our economy.

The late American philosopher Russell Kirk (1918-1994) defined the difference between Conservative and Liberal mindsets.

The Conservative believes in limits. The Liberal rejects limits.

The Conservative is willing to say no to more and more when it becomes destructive.

However, the Liberal floats along with or pushes for more, regardless of limits, reason.

We are living the results of "more" crashing down on us.

The bloom is coming off the rose.

2009-11-12T11:27:00.001-08:00

Recently the History Channel carried a program about the fall of Rome.

It posed the following questions: Who at the time clearly saw the "bloom" was coming off the "rose?" When did they notice it? How did they announce it?

Fast forward. Apply the above questions to the U.S.A. today as the "bloom" is coming off its "rose." When did it start? Who started it? How did it start? Here are some plausible answers.

The Vietnam War laid the foundation for the coming institutional failure of the U.S.A. It began the destruction of the confidence of the American people in their government, which continues.

LBJ campaigned for election on a peace platform and promptly took the country to war - without a congressional declaration of war required by the Constitution of the U.S.A. He inflated the currency (printed fake money) to pay for it, rather than tax the country, to avoid "blow-back." However, the "blow-back" came in the form of soaring oil prices and economic dislocation .

The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue the erosion. It is now the "same tune, second verse" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Undeclared overseas wars are no longer the exception to the rule. They are the rule. The American people are powerless to challenge, stop this slow bleeding to death.

Ronald Reagan, a recycled second-rate movie actor, preyed on the human desire to "want something for nothing." The American upper classes would get tax cuts without having to pare back government services. The result was a huge "budget hole," which subsequent regimes have continued to expand. To plug this "hole," the gangsters print more and more "fake money." The result is rising oil prices, loss of jobs, and the collapse of the American middle class.

The vampire banksters on Wall Street, and their gangster allies in Washington, also steal resources from what is left of the middle class through their looting of financial institutions. Their systematic theft of capital is a form of economic terrorism. The result is a growing loss of jobs, productive capacity and infrastructure, health care, and competitive edge.

Meanwhile, the ruling regime provides its version of "bread and circuses," again at the expense of what is left of the middle class. A growing under-class siphons resources from what is left of the middle class in the form of welfare payments and provides a rising crime rate in return.

Yet, ironically, the dying American middle class believes it is free because it now has unfettered access to pornography and gambling. It is, as Aldous Huxley predicted, a "false freedom."

It is interesting to note that exactly when the middle class began to die the ruling class relaxed access to pornography and gambling. They are "opiates of the people." They create a false sense of freedom. They distract people from the ongoing destruction of their standard of living - and basic freedoms.

Yet, Americans somehow are free because they can look at dirty pictures and pull levers on slot machines.

The next step, of course, will be the relaxation of drug laws. Oh boy, we Americans are really free because we can get "stoned out of our minds" whenever we want! If people cannot "think straight" now, imagine how little objective thinking will occur when opium dens flourish.

It is interesting to note that when the Communists took power in China in 1948 one of their first actions was to destroy the drug trade in China.

If you are doped out of your mind you cannot work and you cannot shoot straight. A society needs to feed and defend itself. These are the first orders of business. You cannot do this with "stoned" people.

The USA is too far gone now to "reverse engines." People who are not in touch with objective reality are no threat to the vampire ruling class. Look for more drug use and abuse. It serves the vampire ruling class.

Meanwhile, our manufacturing base is disappearing, crime rates are soaring, health care costs are skyrocketing, more and more people are lucky if they can find minimum -wage jobs.

The "bloom is coming off the rose" again. The sad part is nobody seems to care any longer.

History repeats. The second time, of course, it repeats as farce, because if we studied history we ought to know better than to repeat it.

If anything survives, perhaps some History Channel in the distant future will do a program on the U.S.A. similar to the one on Rome.

The Future of Manners

2009-11-10T22:39:00.000-08:00

At the University of Wisconsin - Madison (my alma mater), I had the good fortune to hear an after-dinner speaker, a Professor Salter. He was an expert on China. I shall never forget him.

Salter made offered two insights which inform our future, or lack of a future.

1) Asian culture "rounds" persons through emphasis on good manners in human relations. When two circles collide they bounce off each other. Manners, the "rounding" of a person, in short, reduces conflict, friction between and among people. Moreover, the population densities in Asia enhance the need for manners to help people to get along with each other in dense masses.

2) The Western person in contrast is a "square," somebody who lacks the "rounding" of manners. In fact, today our society celebrates vulgarity, the lacks of manners, as an achievement. The mass media are full of this. What happens who two squares collide? They do not bounce or blance off each other. Instead, they lock, clash.

As we eliminate basic manners from our society, more and more we shall find it hard to get along with other people, domestic and foreign, especially Asians. In the West it will be "make my day."

Because of wide-open spaces in North America, it has been easy to run away, escape from other people. Today, our organizatioinal life inhibits this historic escape valve for tension among people in Western society, especially in North America.

On the other hand, those North Americans who somehow retain manners will be able to work well with Asians. At the rate the USA is collapsing, all of us will need to measure up to Asian standards of manners if we want to do business, have a future.

Yet, our educational systems no longer teach or insist on manners. It is the Titanic again.

However, those who are astute enough to know who will be in the driver's seat in the future, "rounded" Asians, will develop and practice manners as a matter of future survival.

Warren Buffet bets big on a trend forecast!

2009-11-05T10:07:00.000-08:00

Today (11-4-09), the business section of the Wisconsin State Journal carried a story about how Warrrenn Buffett, the second richest person in America, wants to buy a railroad system, the second largest in the U.S. This is striking, because he has made much of his money in real estate, not railroads. As a result, I read the "fine print."

Toward the end of this article, Buffett stated his rationale. It is simple. He predicts the price of oil is going to rise sharply; this will make trucking of products exepnsive in comparison with railroad deliverires. The next paragraph pointed out that this railroad system is on of the backbones of food exports from the USA to China!

Note the convergence of two massive economic forces here. The first is oil. The second is China. Buffett wants to position hiimself to profit from trends in these two major sectors of the global economy. One result could be an increased reliance in the USA on local production of food, which would undercut corporate agriculture. Local food production, in turn, could enhance the growth of organic foods, which are healthier to eat than corporate "Frankenfood."

Buffett is betting his money, an estimated $34 billion US dollars, where he believes trends are taking us. His bet really caught my attention. We need to get ready for a really rough economic ride if in fact his trend forecast is accurate.

Toxic Trends in American Education

2009-10-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

Genaro, here are two findings, or trends, in your articles that caught my attention. Let me explain.

1. Education as commodity – such as the quality of educational programs being offered in these rapidly changing times.

This statement sums up a mindset that is destroying education, especially higher education. It goes like this. Students pay tuition. They purchase an education; because they are purchasing a service, they expect to consume it on their terms. The customer is always right; the provider dare not expect the students to measure up to any standards.

We have reduced higher education to a transaction of no greater value or signifance than purchasing a car or haircut. The customer, student, is in the driver's seat; as a result, if the customer does not want to work hard to meet standards, there is no way to compel this, as long as we accept the notion the student as customer is king or queen.

2. Businesses are expressing dissatisfaction with the skills of those who do graduate.

The statement above rebuts the notion that we can treat education as a commodity and cater to student demands. I came to this conclusion over the weekend. It is this. The marketplace, not the student, is the customer of higher education. Business, not students, will make or break higher education, because it will reject the graduates and move production and operations to workforces with hard skills because of high educational standards and strong work ethics. We more and more lack standards and a work ethic. The result is outsourcing overseas.

Over the weekend, I attended a conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of the panels was on the future of the economy here. One of the panelists was VP of Johnson Controls. He stated his company locates production because of the workforce, not taxes, real estate costs, sports stadiums, etc. He noted his company can no longer find qualified technicians, and the ones they find lack a compelling work ethic.

Our public K-12 system has led our people to believe that they have a right to waste time, resources, and get something for nothing in school and beyond school. This rot is finding its way into higher education. Why should a student study hard to become an electrician when we can become an investment "bankster" and get something for nothing on a grand scale. We tolerate these vampires on Wall Street and in Washington, and they send a powerful message: You are stupid if you work for a living. This is killing us; it is a cultural (values) issue.

At some point, if America wants to survive, it must make some basic choices. It must reverse these trends. It can expect people to measure up, or we can continue to measure down until the country totally collapses into chaos.

The Present and Future of America

2009-10-05T21:36:00.000-07:00

I am reading David Simon's Tony Soprano's America. Simon teaches sociology at the Unversity of California - Berkley in San Francisco.

He claims America as a society, a whole, has ceased to believe in a positive, better future, and the existence of persons or leaders who can take us there. We no longer trust the systems in which we live. The result is alienation and lack of authenticity. Simon pinpoints the collapse of the middle class as a major driver of this pessimism about the future.

Simon uses the TV series as a mirror on American society. "Life in effect imitates art", as the old saying goes. Or art is successful - a TV hit with viewers in this case - because it reflects the life and speaks to the concerns of the audience.

The author makes a convincing connection between trends and the content of this TV series. My wife and I in fact have watched every episode of this series, which ran for three seasons. Simon's analysis explains why the series has fascinated us.

In August (2009), we spent several weeks in Canada. In Toronto, I told friends that more and more Americans need to think and behave like gangsters because of the systems in which they live. The vampires on Wall Street and in Washington leave us no option. Or as Tony Soprano noted in one episode, "Forget duty and honor. Manuever."

This amorality has poisoned American society - from the top down. Simon says this toxic "scamming of the system" by our elites is causing a severe disconnect between the people of this land and their institutions. We are risking institutional failure, to use another concept, because of this lasck of trust and the pessimism it is breeding.

The late American historian Barbara Tuchman, who died in 1984, noted toward the end of her life that America was - and is - risking institutional failure. Until we recover the concept of honor, she said, we will not be able to reverse decline.

Dr. Paul Rux

Future of Work in America - if Any

2009-06-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

(2009) BA 225 Week 7 Lecture – Paul Rux, Ph.D.

I began teaching for Upper Iowa University onsite (Madison, Wisconsin center) in 1996. I started teaching online for it in 1999. Below is a select list of courses that I have taught over the years to give you a better idea of the depth of my knowledge of management.

Business Ethics (BA 225, undergrad, online)
Continuous Quality Improvement (BA561, grad)
Organization Diagnosis & Intervention Design (BA560, grad, online)
Organization Development (BA553, grad)
Training and Development (EDU587, grad, online)
Training and Development (BA371, undergrad)
Supervision (BA362, undergrad)
Management Information Systems (BA222, undergrad)
Management Information Systems Strategies (MIS 435, undergrad)
Senior Projects (ID498, undergrad)
Supervised 8 Master’s in Business Leadership internships and theses.
Project Management (MIS360, undergrad)
M.B.A. Business Research Methods (BA528, grad)

Over the years, I have had many chances to reflect on what management is and is not.
Above all, I have had the challenge of “boiling down” management to its basic essence.
Here is the outcome of my “boiling down”. Management knows when to use “carrots” and “sticks”. When do we use rewards – “carrots?” When do we use punishment – “sticks”? My “carrots and sticks” approach mirrors the Theory X (“sticks”) and Theory Y (“carrots”) of Douglas McGregor’s classic The Human Side of Enterprise. He got it right, and here is why.

Theory X has its roots in “Scientific Management” of Frederick Taylor at the start of the last century. It was a response to the needs to manage well in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution. We can calculate what needs to be done and how best to do it. We can design reasonable (“scientific”) job structures and processes – and expect people to measure up to them. For example, Taylor studied the best size of shovels for jobs to avoid doing damage to the worker and improving productivity at the same time.

Theory Y has its roots in “Human Relations Management” of Elton Mayo. It was a response to the extreme applications of “Taylorism” above. We humans are more than “head”. We are also “heart”. We have feelings. We crave meaning. We value fairness. As a result, we need to treat people with consideration and as more than extensions of assembly lines and machinery. If Taylor value engineering, precise measurements, Mayo valued psychology and sociology. Both, of course, have their place in management.

The challenge now is to restore balance between Mayo and Taylor, between Theory Y and Theory X, between “carrots” and “sticks”. We have succumbed to “psycho-babble”, pop psychology that more and more excuses the need for disciplined behavior in the workplace. If we do not, we shall continue to destroy ourselves and favor outsourcing.

This infection of “psycho-babble” in large part has also come from our permissive public school system, which is busy “measuring down” to the lowest common denominators of behavior. The result is the lack of a work ethic, the acceptance of disciplined behavior, the need to measure up to reasonable expectations on the job. As a result, we have a labor force of persons who are having a prolonged adolescence until age forty overall.

Industrial psychologist Morris Schechtmann, author of Working Without a Net, has studied the results of this prolonged adolescence in the American workforce. His conclusion is: structure the workplace, for what passes as a workforce in this country cannot do it. He advocates a strong dose of Taylor’s “Scientific Management”, or McGregor’s Theory X.

Theory X, in effect, says, we expect you to “measure up” or expect the use of a strong “stick”, uncomfortable consequences. It is the antidote to the current Theory Y psycho-babble that excuses laziness, insolence, cheating, lying, etc. to avoid hurting feelings.

Theory Y now gives “carrots” to persons regardless of their behavior, productivity, for they feel entitled to rewards without work. To expect otherwise, hurts their precious feelings. Meanwhile, companies outsource jobs overseas to countries with work ethics.

If you cannot swing a “stick”, do not get into management. If you have problems with concepts like “discipline, duty, authority, etc.” do not get into management. In other words, more and more, “nice guys” will “finish last.” Theory Y alone cannot hack it.

It is not popular say what I have just shared. The thought police will soon come after me. Yet, students of management ought not to go into the world of practice with “psycho-babble” blinders to what needs to be done in order to “right the ship” and “sail” it.

Banker Michael J. Panzer on Future of U.S.A.

2009-02-22T20:47:00.000-08:00

Banker Michael J. Panzer appeared on the radio program Coast-to-Coast-AM on Friday February 20, 2009. Here is a summary of his predictions for the USA:

What does Panzner see on the horizon then?

Our currency will continue to be devalued by the ongoing 'printing press' policies of our government, he said, and we can expect an inflationary environment.

Real estate prices will fall even further, perhaps not reaching final lows until 2012 at the earliest.

There will be multiple "lurches down" in the stock market, Panzner continued, noting the DOW might fall by as much as 75% from its current level.

The retail sector could be wiped out as the "religion of consumerism seems to be dying," he said.

At the extreme, Panzner foresees the U.S. breaking apart, conflict with Mexico, and perhaps another world war.

Parts of the country will become "suburban wastelands" due to water and energy issues, Panzner further speculated.

He exhorted listeners to adjust their attitudes and lifestyles accordingly, and to accept the reality that the current economic downturn is not short term -- it's the new norm.

He recommended people pay down debt and live within their means, and advised investors to look at precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum.

Chicago, Illinois and Camp Douglas, Wisconsin

2009-02-20T23:14:00.001-08:00

Recently, I had a chance to visit with an old friend in Camp Douglas, Wisconsin. He is a businessman. Camp Douglas takes it name from the military base across the Interstate from it. It is in fact the home base of the Wisconsin National Guard; it also is home to an airfiield from which Wiscosin soldiers leave for and return from the Middle East.

I asked my friend about area business. He said that more than the usual amount of Chicago, Illinois people were buying weekend retreats in the area. What he said next stunned me.

He said that the current wave of buyers were coming to have a place to which to escape near a military base for security when the insurrections, riots, uprisings, etc. start in Chicago because of the economy.

"Put your money where your mouth is," goes the old saying. These folks from Chicagoland are doing exactly this. To have enough money to afford two homes means they are coming from the middle or upper classes of Chicagoland. In turn, this means they have good educations as a rule.

What these educated, well-off people see coming in the future is cause for pause. Forget bailouts. Prepare an escape route and safe haven. This is no longer "fringe thinking."

Future Trend: America is an economic Titanic.

2009-02-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

The Titanic – By Dr. Paul Rux

The following is a response by Dr. Rux on the recent housing mortage meltdown to one of his business ethics students.

1) The federal government is the original gangster. It has printed fake money to inflate the amount of available credit in order to create a false sense of prosperity so Bush and the other gangsters could win election. In the old days, people gave out "free beer" to potential voters to bribe them. The printing of fake money continues regardless of political party or elections.

The government peddles "free credit" to create a sense of economic well-being for electoral reasons. The "free credit" comes from printing fake money, which is going to set off a hyperinflation that will ruin what is left of our economy. Bailouts only speed up the printing.

There has been no oversight of this, because the banksters who control the political gangsters did not want oversight, limits to their economic terrorism. It is the government, not our government. The banksters and gangsters are not accountable to the folks who foot the bill.

2) The banksters, in turn, used this "free credit" to sucker persons whose eyes were bigger than their pocketbooks to purchase real estate. It also caused a bubble in commercial real estate, which is going to be the next jolt to the economy when this bubble blows up in the near future.

The banksters loaned money without regard to the ability of the sucker customer to repay; the sucker customers gladly used the money to live beyond their means. Now this crowd is asking you and me to pay for this with bailouts - and the eventual hyperinflation that will result from the bailouts. Nobody bails out you or me.

3) The banksters, moreover, took the mortgages created with "free credit" and sold them to foreign banksters. The foreign banksters did not know, or want to know, or care - that these mortgages would melt down in time.

Now, the foreign banksters are facing ruin too - and their countries with them. It is the old human weakness: get something for nothing. There is no such thing, unless you are a bankster or gangster. Foreign countries are going to hate us for this damage.

4) Creating "free credit" might pass the ethical smell test if it resulted in the creation of infrastructures that actually produced tangible items - cars, TVs, furniture, etc.

All of this credit however went into speculation, paper gambling, if you like, and has not created one factory to provide ongoing jobs for our people. It was wasted. I repeat. It was wasted totally.
What does not happen is as important as what does happen. This applies also to wild printing of fake money to create artificial prosperity for election cycles.

In short, the "free credit" created no jobs. Instead it created a huge financial bubble which is now exploding - at the expense of the little folks. As the Chinese Taoists teach, only bubbles burst.

5) Where are we now? You mention saving money. However, as the government continues to print more and more fake money to pay off the crime families that control it, we are going to experience "hyper-inflation”. Prices will skyrocket! We are at the start, not end, of this trend.

We are going to repeat history and face runaway inflation, as did Germany after World War I, when the government there printed money to pay its war debts. This of course raises a parallel question today. How do we pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, soon to expand again?

The answer is: print fake money. The result will be that any savings you have in American dollars will erode, evaporate because of the hyperinflation that printing fake money will cause. This is why people are turning to tangibles like gold instead of fake paper money.

Think three times about how you will save wealth. There is a difference between wealth, tangibles, and money, which is a paper promise to give you something of tangible value in the final analysis. See Revolutionary Wealth (2006) by Alvin and Heidi Toffler about this difference.

6) The result of this process is economic terrorism. When you destroy jobs, factories, family incomes, etc. the result is no different than bombing those facilities and people.

Bailouts will not save us. They only create more fake money, which in turn, will ignite hyperinflation, runaway prices. Note the ongoing price rises in our stores for a reality check. The bailouts are an illusion, political public relations. They will do nothing for us average folks.

America is like the Titanic. It is sinking.

The rich folks have their financial lifeboats to escape - the loot. The rest of us are locked into steerage, below decks, as happened to the poor passengers when the Titanic sank. We have no economic lifeboats, and we are going to go down with the gutted ship.

We are paying for the bankster terrorism, which the crime families in Washington support.

The waves will soon wash over the economic decks. When they do, watch out.

The Future of the Corporate State and the Individual

2009-01-26T19:59:00.000-08:00

BA225- Lecture – Dr. Paul Rux – Week 4

Week 4 of our course deals with chapter 5 in our textbook on the ethical dynamics of large corporations. In order to help us to better grasp the nature of a large corporation’s ethical dimensions, I will outline some of my thoughts about the topic.

John Bowle – John Bowle taught political theory at Cambridge University. When I was a special one-year student as an undergraduate in the Honours School of History and Political Science at the University of Dublin, I read one of his books. In it, he provided an insight that sheds lots of light on our topic. Bowle noted that the only political philosophy created in the 20th century, after the year 1900, was the “Corporate State.”

Prior to 1900, all political philosophy focused on the place of the individual in the state, society, and government, but as the Industrial Revolution spawned ever-larger business corporations, which government and other institutions have copied (the factory model). These huge corporations, private, public, for-profit, not-for-profit, religious, military, mass media, etc., dwarf the importance, impact, and value of the individual.

The Corporate State approach to politics sought to account for this reality, or what its proponents considered to be the reality of the Industrial Age with its centralized, bureaucratic, factory-based models of doing business. It argued that instead of a system of government, economics, social services, etc. that sought to represent individual preferences through direct participation (“participatory democracy,” the battle cry of The Sixties), we ought to create an “Economic Parliament” in which the various corporations of the society brokered the resources. In effect, the Corporate State says that the huge labor unions, business corporations, and related bloated governmental agencies in practice cut the pie, and we ought to step up to the plate and recognize this reality.

Benito Mussolini created such an “Economic Parliament” in Italy after he came to power in the 1920’s. There was no need to vote. Your union, your company, or your professional association spoke for you. Of course, you could influence the internal workings of your corporate power bloc, but there was no need to vote as an individual for individuals in parliamentary or congressional elections. In effect, the Corporate State unmasked the reality of the power of huge business corporations and sought to account for it. World War II has made it very unpopular to talk about this view of government, economics, and society, but Professor Bowle argued that we ought not to let war propaganda about fighting for freedom against Fascists like Mussolini obscure the valid insights that the Corporate State concept provides.

Chapter 5 in our textbook in effect is a screed, an argument against the reality of the Corporate State. It seeks individual accountability in an environment that no longer values the individual when it comes to actual business, social, governmental, and political practices. Consider the armies of lobbyists who descend on government before, during and after elections. Consider the huge corporate contributions to various leaders to make sure that the corporations, which include big government, big business, and big labor, get their way at the expense usually of those of us who are not part of big corporations.

In 1993, William Greider published his bestseller Who Will Tell the People? In it he in effect argued that big business, big government, and big labor had made a sham and farce of electoral politics in America based on the myth or sham of individual democracy. In effect, Greider announced that the Corporate State has triumphed in industrial societies.

All of us, including your professor, value the individual, his or her worth, his or her rights, his or her accountability, etc. Yet, how realistic is it to expect the individual to go up against huge concentrations of economic, political, and social power – as the Corporate State describes? It may be, as Greider argues, we are just fooling ourselves about the power of the individual to make an impact, including ethical impacts, on the huge corporate structures that dwarf and tower over us – and for those of us on the outside of them, ignore and / or exploit us.

Now, here is the good news. The new Internet-based economy gives us the technological tools now to decentralize power, business, economics, politics, services, etc. in ways that will break up the factory model of doing business that the Corporate State describes. The Internet-based outsourcing and telecommuting trends signal that the day in which the center controlled one and all may be numbered. The individual’s website has the same reach and accessibility as does the website of IBM. As the centralized corporate factory method of business and economics collapses, the decentralized, Internet-based, networked business processes that are replacing it offer us a chance to reinvent a scale of living and business that gives the individual person a real say, which in turns, gives him or her real ethical power. We are not yet there, but the lament for the ethical power of the individual in our textbook is real.

To expect the individual to overthrow the Corporate State in areas like ethics based on the power of Ethical Ideals is wishful thinking in my view. However, if we use the new Internet-based technologies to decentralize economic processes, which, in turn will undermine centralized bloated governmental agencies and other similar associations and power blocs, I believe we can reverse the power of the Corporate State. In the process, we will provide realistic opportunities for personal ethical impact again on our organizations, because they will be of a human scale again.
--

Third Party US President by 2016

2009-01-22T18:42:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, December 31, 2008
DE BORCHGRAVE: Annus horribilis 2009?
Arnaud de Borchgrave
COMMENTARY:

In "Countdown to a Meltdown," the Atlantic's James Fallows describes "America's Coming Economic Crisis, a look back from the election of 2016," when the 46th president of the United States will be the first since before the civil war to be neither Democrat nor Republican.
Once the run on the dollar started, predicts Mr. Fallows, a former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and prominent journalist, everything seemed to happen at once. There was the lesson of the United Kingdom in 1992, of Mexico in '94, of emerging Asia in '97, of Russia in '98, and of Brazil in '98, "and of the U.S. in 2009."

In "Chronicle of a decline foretold," prominent economic historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the Financial Times, said though this was "the worst economic crisis in 70 years, many people remained in deep denial about it." Despite President Obama's soaring rhetoric, the markets sank lower, and "the contagion spread inexorably from subprime to prime mortgages, to commercial real estate, to corporate bonds and back to the financial sector."

Mr. Obama's new New Deal doesn't produce a miracle, Mr. Ferguson predicts, "but the federal takeover of the big banks and the conversion of all private mortgage debt into new 50-year Obamabonds signaled an impressive boldness," and the beginning of the end of the "Great Repression," which substituted for "Depression."

Clinching the recovery is Mr. Obama's decision to fly to Tehran in June, which, like Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972, symbolized "[Mr. Obama's] readiness to rethink the very fundamentals of American grand strategy." Al Qaeda's bungled attempt to assassinate Mr. Obama "only served to discredit radical Islamism and to reinforce Obama's public image as 'The One.' " And America's world leadership is back in business.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez following Fidel Castro's death at 82 triggers the debacle, seen by Mr. Fallows. "A right-wing militia of disgruntled Venezuelans, emboldened by the news Castro was gone, attempted a coup in early 2009. Chavez captured the ringleaders, worked them over and then broadcast their possibly false 'confession' that they had been sponsored by the CIA. That led to Chavez's 'declaration of economic war' against the United States," which in practice meant closing the gigantic Amuay refinery, which produces one-eighth of all the gasoline used on U.S. roads - and reopening it two months later with a pledge to send no more products to American ports.

That kicked off the world's fourth - and worst - oil shock. But neither Mr. Obama nor Vice President Joe Biden had any idea what to do, according to Mr. Fallows' annus horribilis, when the spot price of oil rose 40 percent in the week after Mr. Chavez's declaration - "and then everything went wrong."

Mr. Chavez strikes a notorious secret deal with Beijing for preferential future contracts for Venezuelan oil. In return, China refuses to go along with a U.S.-sponsored Bretton Woods 2, a new world monetary deal. At the annual Davos World Economic Forum, a ranking Chinese official declares the dollar is no longer seen as a stable currency. The dollar then plummets 25 percent against the yen and the yuan. Two weeks later it's down 50 percent. The dollar buys 2.5 Chinese yuan, down from eight a year earlier.

The United States sticks to the dollar but the rest of the world no longer wants it. The two kinds of assets wealthy Americans and foreigners least want to hold are shares in U.S.-based companies. The fall of the dollar wipes out any conceivable market gains. Ditto dollar-based bonds, including U.S. Treasury debt.

"The T-note selloff," forecasts Mr. Fallows, "forces interest rates up... stock prices further down, and the race to the bottom is on." Credit card rates become onerous and consumers retreat. Higher fixed costs, from imported components to higher interest rates to lower revenues and shrinking customer base, squeezes all kinds of businesses.

In 2010, the CEOs of the three remaining airlines defy antitrust laws and form a single new airline, the AmFly Corp. Half as many flights to 150 fewer cities, with a third as many jobs (all nonunion). In 2012, Toyota acquires GM and Ford. For 10 years, the two U.S. companies had lost money on every car sold. "With gas at $6, the prime interest rate at 15 percent, stock and housing markets in the toilet... a weak dollar ... made the companies a bargain for Toyota."

Mr. Fallows walks his readers through a White House Security-in-Shelter Summit; the federal purchase of 1 million RVs and mobile homes, built at idle auto and truck plants; the "poisoned chalice" of the Democratic nomination in 2012; the bankruptcies of state and local governments; legalized prostitution in 31 states; California closes 63 of its 110 community colleges; the Chinese Education Ministry takes over the funding of the University of California-Berkeley physics, computer-science, biology labs, UC-San Francisco genomics lab, all in return for a 51 percent share of all resulting patents.

The United States, understandably, is in the mood for tough love leadership. "When the 'Desert Eagle' scores his astonishing coup in the Saudi desert just before Christmas 2011," Mr. Fallows writes, "America knows who its next leader [will] be. For a four-star general to join his enlisted men in a nighttime HALO special-operations assault was against all established practice. The Eagle's determination to go ahead reveals him to be essentially a MacAthuresque ham. But the element of surprise is total, and the unit surrounded, captured, and gagged Osama bin Laden before he was fully awake."

The general's news conference next day is the largest live audience in history, "breaking the record set a few months earlier by the coronation of England's King William V. The new American hero is like nothing seen since Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris in 1927. He is, of course, strong on defense; urgent about 'fighting smart against our economic enemies'; and broadly appealing on 'values' - a devout Catholic who had brought the first openly gay commandos into a front-line combat unit."

The United States has its first across-the-board electoral sweep. The national hero, predictably, doesn't make anything better. The two-party system, in trouble for decades, collapses after eight years of failures - to the benefit of the "neglected vast center."

It is now glaringly obvious the United State no longer controls "its economic fundamentals." Compared with the past, "America has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair." Compared "with the rest of the world, it's on the way down. We think we are a great power - and our military is still ahead of China's. Everyone else thinks that over the past 20 years, we finally pushed our luck too far."

China's "Twenty Harvards" brand name, as Mr. Fallows' peers over the horizon, produces the "Chinese mission to Mars, with astronauts from Pakistan, Germany and Korea"; and Beijing and Mumbai campuses compete for top honors in the World Ingenuity Test.

The American disease is "the sense of sunset, decline, hopelessness." Half the country's households live on less than $50,000 a year, he writes, "but a year in private college now costs $83,000, a day in a hospital $1,350, a year in a nursing home $150,000. ... Eighty percent of the public is priced out of a chance for future opportunity."

Mr. Fallows' is a wake-up call - and a roadmap for Barack Obama's New Deal.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times and for United Press International

Late, Once Great, United States of America

2008-12-29T09:48:00.000-08:00

MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker.

During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."

Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.

Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.

The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."

In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.

"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."

At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.

He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union.

Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.

Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.

For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.

The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.

1776 Redux in America

2008-12-05T13:24:00.000-08:00

American trendcaster Gerald Celente recently told Fox News that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.

Celente’s accuracy is widely heralded since he correctly predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar.

2007, Celente forewarned that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others.
Celente has stated that the current financial downturn will ultimately lead to nothing less than revolution.

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

It will be another version of 1776. Americans will revisit "no taxation (Wall Street Bankster and Washington Crime Family ripoffs and bailouts) without representation."

Who will win this round?

Black Swans and Future Studies

2008-11-22T12:08:00.000-08:00

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960-) offers an insight for Future Studies in his recent book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Randhom House, 2007).

Taleb, born and raised in Lebanon, earned his Ph.D. in Management Science at the University of Paris. His M.B.A. is from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a successful financial trader on Wall Street. He is now a Professor of Risk Management at New York University's Polytechnic Institute and a Visiting Professor in Cognitive Sciences at the London Business School. His insights below about predicting events come from video interviews.

For centuries, Taleb reminds us, nobody believed black swans existed. All of the swans in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia were white. When European explorers, however, reached Australia, this "for sure" collapsed. They - unexpectedly - found black swans!

For Taleb, the black swan is a metaphor for our "illusion of control" because of science and mathematics. In fact, science and mathematics measure narrow, select slivers of overall reality.

Our computer-generated, mathematical models of reality, which we use to make predictions, are highly flawed from the start. They are vulnerable to unpredictable "rare events" like the disaster of World War I (and II), the discovery of penicillin, and the arrival of the Internet.

Mathematics gives us the "illusion of numerical control" of the present and future. In fact, mathematical modeling actually masks the existence of risks. Mathematics cannot predict.

We ought not to replace the value of human life experience with mathematical formulae, statistical modeling and predictions, and "financial engineering." Yet, this is what we did in the 1970's. The result is the start of a worldwide depression which we see unfolding around us.

Moreover, the "over-optimized" centralization of economics, government, education, etc. along the lines of the factory model of the Industrial Revolution, makes us even more vulnerable to massive damage from unexpected "rare events," or "Black Swans." Because all elements in the system are tightly linked, damage in one part quickly becomes damage to the rest of the parts.

Add incompetence and corruption to these "over-optimized" systems, and you have a prescription for disaster sooner or later - often unexpected because of our illusion of control.

Nor does government regulation remove the probability of "Black Swans." It is another "over-optimized" system. To add to the damage, it fixes yesterday - "after the horse is out of the barn." Reality is a complex system, and our knowledge of it is incomplete - especially when we suffer from the "illusion of control" because of our blind belief in mathematics and science.

Taleb argues that past crises do not predict the future, for history has few "rare events." For him, the study of history and economics only creates more illusions. They create "retrospective distortions" of reality, and this can only lead to disaster if we attempt to use them to go forward.

Taleb also points out that when change, a "Black Swan" arrives, it is sudden, explosive, not incremental, linear. Mathematics has conditioned us to such incremental and linear thinking.

Where do the insights of Taleb leave us? Fortunately, he brings things down from "20,000 feet" for us with specific suggestions on how to survive and thrive in the "real world." Here are some:

"Avoid guys with ties." To earn the tie, you must buy into the illusions of the system.
"Don't mess with complex systems." Think Libertarian. Think Quantum Physics. Let reality organize itself. Or as Taoism teaches, let water find its own level. The rest is wasteful intervention and "spinning of wheels." Do not deny people reality checks.
"Do not read newspapers." The mass media are shills, fronts, PR hacks for the system, which has no contact with reality in the first place. Mass media compound distortion.
"Operate small." Think networking. Think local. Do not go down with the Titanic.
"Fail with pride." Work. Learn. If you fail, work and learn again - smarter. In a world of illusions, it takes time to figure out reality, what is really going on, and how to use it.
"Hard work and luck." Because reality is complex, there are no guarantees. Probability is a reality. Do not be hard on yourself if not every coin toss is heads.
"Only invest where the costs to invest are small and the potential returns are large." For him, opportunities are best in technology yet, especially biotechnology.
"Be nice to little people." They stand outside our systems of illusion; often they can provide reality checks - and survival contacts - when systems fail us.

There, now you need not to read the book! Everything you ever wanted to know about Blacks Swans is in this post. At least it is for most of us. The implications of Black Swans for Future Studies include:
1) be skeptical - especially about conventional wisdom and scientific predictions,
2) you cannot automate or model away human judgment based on life experience in making decisions about how to prepare for the future,
3) think, act, and live small - as far away as possible from dependence on "over-optimized" systems vulnerable to Black Swans,
4) promote networking, the decentralization of systems to avoid the spread of damage in one part of a system to all parts of the system.

Taleb in effect argues for "redundancy" in systems. He argues for decentralization to protect us from fatal collapse. This is the logic of the Internet which came into being to help the military to communicate in the event a nuclear attack - a Black Swan -wiped out central communication hubs. No sane person wants such Black Swans. But we have learned not to count on sanity.

Trendcaster Gerald Celente November 19, 2008

2008-11-22T00:43:00.000-08:00

I had the good fortune to hear a radio interview on Novermber 19, 2008, with Gerald Celente one of the leading "Futurists" of our time. Here are some of the highlights of his predictions.

Commercial real estate is collapsing. Its collapse will equal if not surpass the devastation of the housing real estate collapse. Commercial vacancy rates are going up; as a result, commercial real estate is losing its value.
We are heading not for a Great Depression. We are heading for the Greatest Depression! There is no way out. Not even the election of Barack Obama can stop it.
Nobody is buying. Look for store closings on a large scale in February of 2009 as a result of the worst Christmas retail sales season since World War II. Huge layoffs are coming.
Wall Street's model of business success was chain stores, franchises. This model of constantly getting bigger is now broken. Look for the collapse of chain stores and their related shopping malls. Into this vacuum will step new local small businesses! This is the opportunity in the coming chaos.
Agri-business is going to go bust and belly up too. The reason is the cost of transporting food over long distances is no longer cost-effective. Look for the rise of local food production! This is another opportunity in the coming chaos. The collapse of agri-business parallels the bigger-is-better collapse of chains and their related shopping malls.
Look for the triumph of Main Street over Wall Street, which has hijacked Washington.
We are watching the end of American Empire. The coming overall economic collapse it home will make it impossible to continue to wage overseas wars for corporate oil profits.
Bailouts only prolong the pain of the current bursting financial and economic bubbles.
This reminds me of an old American folk song. Its refrain goes like this: "It's a gift to be simple. It's is a gift to be free. It is a gift to come down to where we ought to be!"
So it was. So it is! Thanks, Gerald Celente!

Reply to a Doctoral Student on Trends

2008-11-21T22:17:00.000-08:00

Another way to restate your comment follows: networking is the model of business, government, education, etc. today. The old centralized, factory model of doing business is collapsing around us. What is replacing it is the Internet-based networking model of how to organize and manage today. I think this transition is exciting!

The current economic terrorism by the Wall Street Banksters has exposed the stupidity today of concentrating ever-more power and resources into central clearing-houses called Washington, Wall Street, the UN, etc. When systems are so massive, centralized, resource-greedy, any dysfunction becomes a calamity for the entire society, economy, government, etc.

Instead, we need to debundle, decentralize along networking lines to make sure that if a dysfunction occurs in one part of the network it damages only that part of it. This is the original logic of the Internet, which flows from the military need to bypass communication breakdowns in the wake of an atomic attack.

We are witnessing the breakdown of huge corporations - and related corporate entities of similar scale in education, government - right now. Because of their massive scale, they drag down everything around them for miles. We shall find in the aftermath of the system breakdown around us a renaissance of decentralized resource centers that confederate, collaborate, partner, team, etc. as they need.

Think of the ancient Greek city states. Think of the Roman Empire. We are seeing the collapse of Empire around us and its centralized dysfunction. Look for the emergence of "city states" that can combine and recombine at flexible high speeds as the model for the future. Your research ideas are on trend.

Future of the American Economy 2008

2008-10-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

Here are three key factors, as the year 2008 comes to a close, that will drive the future of the American economy to at least 2012.

1) An End of Profits to Preserve and Create Jobs Due to Wall Street Banksters

Without profits there is no business. I like to use the word "surplus." With Peter Drucker and Joseph Schumpeter, I believe this "surplus" provides the resources to maintain and expand business, which in turn creates and preserves jobs. With Drucker and Schumpeter, I am against the idea of profits boiling down to the level of Wall Street Banksters - take the money and run, gut the company, leave people unemployed, profits at any price regardless of human suffering (ethics here, or lack of them).

TRENDCAST: For now, the Wall Street Banksters have looted profits; as a result, look for a continued collapse in job preservation and creation - big time - for at least 2009-2012.

2) Doing More with Less (Sustainable Leadership) Due to Wall Street Banksters

Managerial and organizational effectiveness and efficiency correlate perfectly with the need for profits to create and preserve jobs. Getting your money's worth from resources - human and non-human - is the order of the day, since the Wall Street Banksters have destroyed for all practical purposes our credit and financial system. All of us must learn how to do more with less.

Having surplus resources to compete, innovate and using them in cost-effective ways are on trend. We call this trend: "sustainable management," or doing more with less. Conserve resources. Make them stretch. The Internet-based boom in innovation and entrepreneurship is out. Sustainable Leadership - doing more with less - is in. Check it out. Accept it.

TRENDCAST: Rethink. Retool. Explore and learn "Sustainable Leadership." Check out and join new groups like the Association for Sustainable Leadership: http://www.sustainableleaders.org/ .

3) End to Government-Imposed Social Responsibility Mandates on Business

Per observation number one above about the ethical purpose of profits, business creates jobs. Social welfare work and social engineering are the tasks of other agencies. Peter F. Drucker estimated in 2002 that 25% of every dollar spent on management in America goes to comply with imposed "social responsibility" mandates by government. This dulls the competitive edge of business at home - and, above all, in the global marketplace. Other countries avoid such costs.

TRENDCAST: Look for growing pressures to end costly programs like Affirmative Action.

4) Local Production Trumps Long-Distance Hauling Due to Rising Energy Costs

Energy costs are going to reinvent our economy with focus on local production and services. It is no longer cost-effective to truck tomatoes from California for sale in Wisconsin. The price of oil will climb to new heights after the November 2008 elections in the US. Look for an increase in telework as the "creative class," who can use the Internet to go to work, escape commuting costs and rising crime rates in cities because of job loss. Rural America can reinvent itself to resemble Thomas Jefferson's vision of a noble, independent "yeomanry." The centralized factory model of the Industrial Revolution is dying. Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" rules.

TRENDCAST: Look for a boom in "community supported agriculture" (CSA), hydrophonic greenhouses, and a migration of the "creative class" to Norman Rockwell's ex-urban America.

Democracy: Past, Present, and Future

2008-09-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Democracy: The worship of jackals by jackasses.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

The men the American public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Business Ethics or Economic Terrorism: Future Options

2008-09-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

What Is the Purpose of Business? – By Paul Rux, Ph.D.

As the Wall Street and Washington crime families loot banks, real estate, insurance, etc. it is a good time to ask what the purpose of business is. I love to ask this of my students.

The usual student response is: “The purpose of business is to make money.” If all you want to do is to make money, join the Mafia. Colombian drug cartels work here too.

For ethical reasons, I prefer the answer of Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005): “The purpose of business is to create jobs.” Money is simply a means to this end, not an end in itself.

Drucker argues a sane society does not allow activities to exist that harm it. Think cancer. We do not want cancers in /on our bodies. They take, but they do not give.

Activities that simply take from society and return nothing constructive in exchange – take the money and run to the banks in the Cayman Island – are cancers. We cure cancer.

Drucker’s cure is to understand and refocus on the purpose of business – to create and preserve jobs that support lives and families. Whatever undermines this gets outlawed.

Drucker builds on the insights of economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). Schumpeter was the first economist to study carefully the dynamics of entrepreneurship.

In entrepreneurship, profits exist to expand and improve the business. We plow profits back into the business to assure its survival. This in turn preserves and creates.

Richard J. Needham (1912-1996), columnists for the Toronto Globe and Mail, pointed out the first two duties of society are to: 1) feed itself 2) defend itself. Jobs feed people.

Or as Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) argues in his “hierarchy of needs,” our first task is to provide basic food, shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. We require physical security.

The genius of Drucker was to balance profits – a measure of economic efficiency and fuel for innovation and improvement - with the basic needs of society to survive.

Drucker respects Plato’s dictum about ethics being behaviors that do not injure – others and / or ourselves. Making and withdrawing money from productivity is unethical.

I admire business persons who create jobs. Not everybody can do this. They are unique. They also are ethical, for they plow their profits back into helping people live good lives.

I detest economic gangsters who loot businesses to create unemployment in the aftermath. I detest political gangsters who enable this kind of economic terrorism.

I am hoping, you, my students, will provide the ethical renewal that our business needs and our society deserves. (This is Dr. Paul Rux; I approve this message.)