“Love you all, but there's a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you are a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” Billie Eilish, after receiving the Music Innovator Award. At the ceremony, Stephen Colbert announced that Eilish donated $11.5...

  Bertrand Russell wrote his essay on the benefits of doing nothing in 1932 during the Great Depression which destroyed the jobs and lives of millions. You can read the essay at this LINK or scroll down to the bottom of this post and listen to it.Russell argues that...

 If capitalism undermines democracy (Lindblom, see Politics and Markets 1) and democracy undermines capitalism (Schumpeter, see Politics and Markets 2) then how can we make them compatible?That is the question we face today: authoritarian capitalism, democratic...

 In Politics and Markets 1, using Charles Lindblom’s model, I discussed how capitalism can undermine democracy. Let’s turn this around and look at how democracy can undermine capitalism.The influential economist Joseph Schumpeter finished his career at Harvard...

     In 1977 Charles Lindblom published Politics and Markets. In the book he explored what he called “the privileged position of business” in capitalist democracies. Governments depend on private business to invest, create jobs, and maintain economic stability....

     The only appropriate answer to “fiction or nonfiction? art or science?” is both.Fiction is a simulator. It provides emotional knowledge. How does a character’s suffering, courage, cowardice, love, loss and redemption feel? It provides moral imagination. “What...

      “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Thucydides It’s been fifty years since I studied the history of western civilization at Stanford. My professor, E. Berkeley Tompkins, wrote Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate,...

       Donald Trump and the Evil Queen in Snow White share two overriding traits: their psychological narcissism and their penchant for retribution. You may think it’s strange to have a fairy-tale-like character as President of the United States but it is what it is....

         No Kings Day – Convergence, Divergence Religious awakenings or revivals often coincide with and sometimes bolster authoritarian political leadership and concentrated business power. The Founders of our early Republic, especially Jefferson and Madison, argued...

  One of the advantages of being an author is the opportunity to exchange books with other authors. I recently exchanged my new book of short stories, Pieces of Time (exclusively available at Gallery Books in Mendocino for now) with Alison Gardener's The Wild Mushroom...