Moral Innovator’s Perspectives on Labor Unions

There is a very nice term for a period of concentration of wealth in the United States. The “Gilded Age” of rapid economic development happened after the Civil War to the turn of the century 120 years ago.

The bright side of the Gilded Age was rapid economic development. After the Supreme Court delivered the 1823 verdict using the Discovery Doctrine to declare all land belong to Caucasians, the first oil well that propelled industrialization started in 1859, followed by the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869. The concentration of wealth led to the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, before the opium revenue from China dried up in the early 20th century after all treasures in China had been emptied. The father of President FDR was a known opium trader.

The dark side of the Gilded Age was the exploitation of labor, even with the emancipation proclamation after the Civil War. African Americans slaves and Asian American coolies had no representation. As a result, Samuel Gompers started in 1881 as The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions that initially drove the support for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 after the Chinese Americans finished the transcontinental railroad 150 years ago.

Without generally accepted accounting principles to compare financial performance on a consistent basis, the stock market crashed partly due to fabricated financial statements, followed by depression (which seems small compared to the current Covid19 pandemic). The call for labor unions was loud and strong. By 1954, the percentage of all workers who belonged to a union peaked at 35%, and the number of union members peaked in 1979 at 21 million workers. At the peak of US economy, there was a thriving middle class, partly due to the Ford Motor Company’s compensation strategy to pay workers sufficient wages to pay for a car.

Labor unions hit a nadir when Ronald Reagan, the President who took USA from a creditor nation to a debtor nation, fired 11,359 air traffic controllers and ban them for life as federal government workers in 1981 (before the ban was lifted by Bill Clinton in 1993).

While not perfect, Labor Unions protect workers with basic rights like safety and health. It is blatantly clear today that health workers, fire fighters and other public servants do not have these basic rights when Donald Trump leads the charge against basic worker rights and refused to take responsibility for even facilitating personal protective equipment to these front line workers against the Covid19 pandemic.

In every crisis, there are dangers and opportunities. The danger of the Covid19 may deliver an opportunity to organize an inclusive and stronger Labor Union. Please do not add a racial line to the increasing wealth gap. Remember the LA police had very little incentive to help when the African American community decided to destroy the Asian American (largely Korean American) community after the Rodney King riots. The winners of the riots were the wealthy Americans who supported the removal of the estate tax so they can keep their wealth. Other than the perks like traveling to Florida for 33% of the time he was supposed to work at The White House, the biggest visible compensation Donald Trump paid his family was when he signed the estate tax law to exclude $11.4 million per person, and the highest estate tax rate became 40%. In 2001, the excluded amount was $675,000, and the highest tax rate was “reduced” to 55% from 77% as recently as 1970.

Moral Innovators perspectives on World History in 25 chronological points

1. No one knows who created God, and no one knows what happened before the Big Bang, so the notion of what happened at the beginning is currently not knowable.

2. Based on what we know today, earth was created 4.5 billion years ago, and the first “living” thing about 4 billion years ago. Again these are educated guesstimates.

3. Primate fossils were on earth 50 million years ago both in Africa and Asia. The notion that hominids came out of Africa is an empirical assumption.
– Asian fossil history is probably underseas because the sea around Singapore, Indonesia and Philippines was one big forest as recently as 20,000 years ago

4. Hominid fossils go back as far as 8 million years, and these first fossils were discovered in Africa (again, because Asian fossils are under the ocean).

5. Among the first evidence of using fire (specifically for cooking) was identified in a Chinese cave that dates back about 1 million years ago.

6. Peking Man is between 750,000 to 300,000 years old. There is a long list of Chinese sites with ancient cultures.

7. Homo sapiens, as we know them today, emerged about 200,000 years ago as tool using nomads.

8. Human population began to explode about 10,000 years ago because of agriculture. Agriculture both:
– helped humans settle down to enjoy life, and
– harvested more food than can be consumed, so humans with a lot of food can explore other things that eventually led to trade of spices/porcelain/etc. and the Silk Road

9. About 90% of global human population on earth of about 10-15 million people 5,000 years ago lived in four central communities: Egypt, Sumer, India and China.

10. Egyptians evolved into Monotheist Christians. Sumerians evolved into Monotheist Muslims. Indians remained in India as Henotheists, and Chinese remained in China as Atheists.

11. About 90% of global human population on earth of 8+ billion people today live in four central communities: Monotheist Christians, Monotheist Muslims, Henotheist Indians and Atheist Chinese.

12. India and China controlled 50% of the global economy and trade between 2000 years ago and 200 years ago. The Chinese Silk Road was a key source of wealth.
– This means China and India were bigger than Egypt or Roman Empires from an economic perspective.

13. The world changed faster after Christopher Columbus returned to Spain in 1493. The Tordesillas and Zaragoza treaties proclaimed the world belong to Spain and Portugal.
– 500 years ago, Spain claimed the Americas. Portugal claimed all of Africa and Asia (including India and China).

14. Britain started as pirates who looted the Spanish ships returning with treasures from Americas. Spain decided to teach Britain a lesson, but was defeated in the 1588
Spanish Armada by Britain. This emboldened the British and Dutch to start British East India Company and Dutch East India Company between 1600-1602.
– Britain and Dutch joined Spain and Portugal to extract treasures from around the world. Indonesia was corrupted by Dutch East India Company
– From Chinese’ perspective, they had zero idea about Tordesillas/Zaragoza treaties, or care less about the trading companies from Britain or Dutch. Chinese like to trade.

15. India and China did not pay enough attention as their economies were still strong. China controlled 35% of the global economy in the year 1820, or 200 years ago.
(China was the world’s biggest economy, by far, at that time, partly because India was colonized by others for centuries, started from Persians and Alexander the Great.)
– The magnitude of the size of economies changed by a whole lot, but USA’s peak was also about 35% of the global economy after World War 2, about 70 years ago.
(However, if you look at this from a per capital basis, USA is much much stronger because China has a much much larger population.)
– Today, China and USA each produce about 18% of the global GNP. Imagine China was the size of the top 2 economies combined today. That was China 200 years ago.

16. British government gave British East India Company the monopoly power to trade opium in 1773. Opium was produced in India and shipped to China.
– not sure if this was correlated to the lost of USA as a colony that declared independence from Britain in 1776.

17. Between 1820 and 1900, Christians led by Britain (and Russia is still dominated by Orthodox Christians today) forced 1 million tons of opium into China, against Chinese law, and extracted an estimated $100 trillion dollars (2012 dollars) out of China, including 70,000 tons of silver.
– China was bankrupt around the year 1900, so the Christians had no more money to get out of China.

18. Without money from China, Christians fought among themselves for wealth. After World War 1, The 1919 Versailles Treaty demanded $33 billion dollars from Germany.

19. Germany paid about 10% of the $33 billion when they democratically elected Adolph Hitler, and through a coalition government, made him the German Chancellor in 1933.

20. Hitler lost World War 2, but the USA was the economic winner by supplying to both side of the war, plus the Lend-Lease program that propelled USA to become wealthy.

21. USA could not sustain the wealth growth with a gold standard currency. Bretton Woods collapsed in 1971 because there was not enough gold to back up the currency.

22. USA supported the growth of OPEC oil partly because the USA dollar was the fiat currency or “black gold” standard that replaced the Bretton Woods system.
– oil was/is just the beginning. There is a lot more wealth in the refineries into gasoline, or plastics out of the petroleum industry that sustained the USA economy.
– Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is believed to be the largest single shareholder of ExxonMobil (through multiple channels of ownership).
– by looking at the cost of production in Saudi Arabia and the price of oil, an average $2 trillion dollars per year is pumped into the oil and gas industry each year for 40 years.
– Saudi has so much wealth with offshoots that financed Osama bin Laden, and now Wahhabism (the most oppressive form of Islam against women that is reaching Malaysia today).

23.The last time USA federal government had a budget surplus was when oil price was around $25/barrel.

24.The root cause of the wealth gap is this $2 trillion per year of profit pumped into the owners of oil and gas properties.

25.The next thing after oil and gas may be technology (such as 5G, Bigger Dipper Satellite based position system, and Blockchain Services network (BSN)). In the longer run look for water. May be good to be in Canada where water is abundant.

Stay safe and healthy through Covid19!

Moral Innovators perspectives on our future

We need to change the current trend of increasing conflicts among humans. Please support our educators and social entrepreneurs to focus on a more comprehensive curriculum where our children can move away from being told what to follow. Let our children learn to pursue what they want to do. German philosopher Emanuel Kant (1724-1804) expressed that “…nothing more dreadful than actions of a person should be subject to the will of another…” that evolved to Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) “…religion is the opium of the people…” while Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1929-1968) dream is to be “…free at last, free at last, thank God ale mighty we are free at last…” Let’s keep an open mind to listen and learn. A moral innovator has a solid foundation of our moral innovations history.

With this framework, we are heading toward greater individual freedom by leveraging hope as an incentive for hard work that balances morality and innovations.
• For those in severe poverty, there is hope our globalized economy and media will help with greater visibility and awareness. Without hope, this is a vulnerable group that may become more extreme such as becoming suicide bombers. A superior example of delivering hope is China’s “market economy with Chinese characteristics” promulgated since 1978 that took 700 million humans out of severe poverty.
• For the majority of humans, appropriate education curricula would encourage our children to both understand how we get to where we are, and use the tools we have to continuously improve the world in which we live. A superior example is the trend in US schools where an increasing percentage of international students have contributed to our knowledge, beginning with graduate schools 50 years ago, undergraduate schools 20 years ago, and exponentially higher international students in the high schools today, while beginning to increase in middle schools.

Imagine a child who knows bio-dynamic farming and understands the importance of genetically modified organisms to feed the projected 10 billion humans on earth by 2050 using machine learning and virtual reality tools. We have the global 5G network to access real time “big data” with block chain encrypted privacy to integrate our computer and cell phone networks to our cars and homes. The knowledge from moral innovations can help our children leverage their skills, mindful of the impact they have on others, and pursue a lifestyle most suitable for them. Knowledge is the freedom our children have earned through their hard work. They are free to accumulate karma for the next life, or earn an open door to heaven in their afterlife, or they can choose to be cremated and physically recycle their ashes into fertilizers in the bio-dynamics cycle.

Both Innovations without morality and morality without innovations are not sustainable. The only sustainable outcome to preserve earth is to balance morality with innovations to achieve harmony.

Moral Innovators’ perspectives on building a wall

Instead of focusing on the government shutdown versus the southern border wall, let us focus on keeping America great by looking at technologies that call for a different kind of wall – firewall.

All US carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, etc.) plan to introduce 5G using at least 18 phone models on platforms like the Snapdragon 855. Undoubtedly, as other countries like China will roll out their 5G networks, USA competitiveness will be challenged. Let us make platforms like 802.11ax work and continue to lead the drafting of standards for convergence such as 5G, WiFi, and other technologies.

By way of background, all wireless connections around the world work in various channels within radio frequency bands, typically 10-180 megahertz channels within 0.8-6.0 Gigahertz radio frequency bands. To be explicitly clear, these channels are like the currents through an electric circuit. This is different than encryptions that are like languages (a person sending English can only be understood if the recipient knows English). With this in mind, older cell phones work between 0.8-1.9 Ghtz, WLAN 4.9-5.0 Ghtz, Cars/Homes between 5.85-5.925 Ghtz, while 5G phones use 3.5 Ghtz for MIMO and 28 Ghtz for mmWave. Ultra Wide Band (UWB) sometimes use 10.6 Ghtz in the USA and 24 Ghtz in China. Here, we will not address the health impacts of these various radio frequency waves.

2019 is a new beginning, partly because we must replace our existing phones to access 5G networks. In the next decade, we will see billions of new phones around the world. We can have the best and most secure cloud, integrated to homes and cars, if we integrate US technologies such as 1) ultra-wide band pulses and block chains to ameliorate security and privacy concerns, and 2) GPS and GIS technologies to stay ahead of Big Dipper, Galileo, and Glonass. Here is what we can see today:

1. 5G roll out has started already. The leading edge users will pay a premium for phones that can process data 5-100 times faster than our current 4G phones. Laptops will become less useful as we integrate these phones to the office while Software as a Service (SaaS) will accelerate the integration of 5G phones towards a subscription based economy. The biggest growth will be implementation of cloud based applications which will impact sales of desktop software. Already, Microsoft is selling Office 365, and we can no longer buy disks to install onto our computers.

2. With the much faster data processing speed, more SaaS will generate lots of data that must be secured. Strategic games can already be played on giant TV screens without desktop computers, and phones will make them mobile. The biggest obstacles that impede this growth have been security and privacy issues. There are at least two concepts that ameliorate these concerns:
a. Block-chains – Even though 99% of block-chains today will not emerge beyond a proof of concept, the server farm network will mature to support the development of standards that are similar to IP for the internet which, with some twists and turns, will define the tipping point for data security/privacy. The problem with block-chains today is lack of standards. Bitcoins represent one specific application of block chains. This is similar to the 1998-1999 internet companies that failed. Without standards, bitcoins will fail.
b. Ultra-Wide Band – UWB uses time-modulated pulses that are impossible to hack. While this technology is limited to shorter ranges, the precision and ability for the penetrating signals make this technology attractive for intelligent homes, especially when integrated into cars as we drive between work and home. An early application of UWB was to detect people (including firefighters) inside burning homes. While WiFi can turn on appliances, UWB can identify anyone (including strangers) before you enter your home.

3. After the equivalent of IP for the internet will be standardized for block-chains and UWB applications, accuracy and precision will become the next priorities. Today, we rely on GPS and GIS to specify our locations. Without additional investments to improve, GPS may not be sufficiently precise to execute future applications. Today, there is a beta app using Big Dipper that can tell the user the weather within a 50 meter radius of each user. Another limitation was revealed when GPS could not locate the Malaysian Airlines aircraft that disappeared over South Pacific Ocean.

Instead of a southern border wall, let’s build a firewall to protect our data and technologies.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Moral Innovator Perspectives on Blockchains

Blockchains represent the computer hardware and software behind the bitcoins application. It is one of the hottest topics in the technology world today. Knowing we may step into stereotypes, it is instructive to observe blockchains from a moral innovation perspective to observe how humanity is changing.

To define a blockchain in its most basic form, it is the ability to communicate (from sender to receiver) information that can be valued by the sender and the receiver which define an application (such as bitcoin as a currency). The communications process itself uses the cloud to connect multiple servers with data that can be interpreted from one server to the next using encryption. The combination of not knowing how many servers in what configuration in this process, along with the encryption technology among each pair of servers make this “blockchain” impossible to hack with what we know today.

In a school, the most sensitive information include the student health records (i.e. HIPAA compliance) and transcripts. A blockchain application in a school could be the school issuing “coins” to students to carry their transcript wherever they go, without having to request a transcript from the school, as long as the recipient of the transcript (e.g. a college) accepts the transcript protected by the blockchain.

Even though customized blockchains can work now, it can be very expensive – too expensive for applications like transcripts. To achieve economy of scale, blockchain applications require an infrastructure with standardized protocols and/or very large transactions like movements of currencies. It is similar but not exactly comparable to the Internet released by DARPA in the 20th century, waiting for HTML(language) and IP (communication protocol) to emerge.

From a Moral Innovator perspective, the values of over 90% of humanity come from Christians, Muslims, Indians and Chinese. Christians and Muslims follow monotheistic values where Christians drive innovations. Indians and Chinese follow community based moral values where Chinese drive trade. (Humans cannot live off morality alone because morality does not feed us.) Less than 10% of humanity lives outside these four communities, the largest of whom are the Japanese. As outliers, Japanese have demonstrated that they can sacrifice their culture such as shogunate in order to emulate the Christian innovations to the extreme. It was the Japanese that delivered the greatest intensity of massacre during the second world war – more intense than the holocaust – when over 300,000 mostly women and children were killed over a 50 day period in 1937. About 100,000 additional Chinese were victims of chemical warfare experiments, the most notorious the unit 731 battalion based in Harbin, China. What makes this worse is the fact that war criminals are still celebrated in the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan today.

Even though blockchains started in the 1990s, it was the Japanese that introduced the bitcoin application in 2008. Large companies like IBM and Google seek the very large transactions (such as payment for the millions of barrels of oil transacted everyday) or the elusive “Big Data.” Without any infrastructure, Christians especially associated with Silicon Valley propelled progress of this innovation after 2008. As a potential instrument of trade to support their One Belt One Road initiative, China is working very hard to suppress the volume of activities through Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) because the infrastructure simply does not exist. Germany is just now beginning to see ICOs and travelling to Silicon Valley to explore how blockchains can correlate to product qualify from standardized processes where the Germans excel. ICO valuation, as described by a Venture Capitalist, is “way out there.”

Without confidence on our innate morality, and without knowledge of a visible path to scalability, Moral Innovators need to focus on the value of the applications that come close to being accepted by coin buyers and sellers. As of April 2018, no compelling visible path exists for any ICO.

Moral Innovators perspective on where we are today, looking forward

Looking at humanity from the beginning of time, we know that humanity created morality about 2500 years ago when Socrates in Greece, Ashoka in India, and Confucius in China described the virtues to strive for in order to live peacefully together. Christians and Muslims have been influenced by Socrates. Ashoka remains influential in India today as his wheel is prominently displayed in the middle of the Indian flag. Confucian values still influence Chinese behaviors as Chairman Mao proclaimed: The laws written by students of Confucius from Qin Dynasty over 2,000 years ago remain in effect in the 20th century. Chinese President Xi Jinping continues with the development of harmonious societies based on “belts and roads” trade that modernize the Silk Road.

Two millennia later, Portugal approved Columbus’ voyage before Spain, but had no money to finance a voyage. Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella defeated the Muslims in the battle of Granada in 1491 which probably financed the Columbus voyage in 1492, before the Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI drafted the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1493 that claimed the entire world for Spain and Portugal, irrespective of the fact that millions of people live around the world.

In other words, morality evolved independently for 2,000 years and we are talking through each other across cultures because the definition of right and wrong has evolved inconsistently around the world. Christians and Muslim interpret morality through religions that are in absolute contradiction with each other. Non-Christians go to hell, and Non-Muslims go to hell. The end result is everyone on earth is condemned to hell since no one can believe in Islam and Christianity at the same time. Among Muslims and Christians, nearly half the world’s population in India and China has no say in their destiny.

Britain became prominent as pirates who stole treasures from ships returning from the Americas. They turned greedy after the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588 and created the British East India Company (BEIC) 1600 to steal treasures from around the world. BEIC survived longer than its similarly corrupt cousin Dutch East India Company partly because the British government granted BEIC monopoly power in opium trade, before the entire world stole what they can in China through opium (e.g. 70,000 tons of silver) within 80 years. USA broke away from Britain 250 years ago. For 200 years (with exceptions like Jeffersonian democracy), USA gave voting power to Caucasian adult males with property ownership, supported by the Supreme Court Chief Justice’s 1823 decision that took land from Native Americans and gave it to European “discoverers.” USA tried hard to reach moral high ground as a global leader which has been completely annihilated by Donald Trump who stole the Presidency.

A century ago, Rudolph Steiner started anthroposophy that respects, but does not follow religions. Anthroposophy incorporates Indian karma and re-incarnation, but not yet the Chinese Confucian philosophies. Anthroposophy integrates mental, physical and spiritual development of children and emulates an egalitarian society. It is the largest secondary school system not affiliated with any religion. By incorporating Chinese morality, it can be nurtured into a global benchmark for educating responsible adults and moral innovators.

Those who ignore history are likely to repeat it. Donald Trump is not only ignoring history, he is blaming history to support his fake reality TV show at the White House. His main goals includes $1 billion income for himself by eliminating the Estate Tax for the rich. Hopefully he will remain an anomaly in future US history.

Moral Innovators’ perspectives on making America great again

On this Thanksgiving Day 2017, USA is a divided country focused on history of sexual harassment by civil servants and Hollywood stars in the last 50 years. While it is fantastic that we are addressing an important issue, we are distracted from the theme of making America great again.

With less than 5% of the global population, USA once commanded as high as 34% of global GDP, or about one out of every three dollars of economic activity in the world was American as recently as 50 years ago. We may still have the #1 or #2 economy in the world today, but our share of global GDP has declined to less than 18% on PPP basis. Making America great again means reversing the trend of declining share of USA in global GDP. The current tax package that eliminates the estate taxes will give Donald Trump another $1 billion to his family which definitely will not help reverse the decline in US share of global GDP.

What will make America great again? We need to understand the world around us, and work hard to add value through moral innovations. This is a lot more difficult than just focusing on innovations without regards to morality which history has shown to be unsustainable (including the current tax package which is innovative but without morality). To illustrate, let’s focus on blockchain technologies that deliver privacy, not speculation on currencies (like bitcoin) which George Soros has proven 20 years ago that could cause havoc in the crisis that impacted Asia and soon followed by the internet bubble burst.

How do we know if we are making efforts to understand the world around us? A metric is to know how many Americans hold US passports to travel overseas. Holding a passport does not guarantee that we travel overseas, and this metric is skewed by about 44 million out of 326 million total Americans who were not US citizens at birth. Nonetheless, it is instructive to look at the trend of passport holders under our last four Presidents: HWBush, Clinton, WBush, and Obama. Under both the HWBush and Clinton administrations, the number of US passport holders more than doubled. This trend has declined to less than 100% under WBush and less than 50% under the Obama administration. In all, only 40% of all Americans hold US passports today. The 40% figure is even lower if we take into consideration that the 44 million American immigrants have a higher likelihood of holding passports.

This may be an important factor why USA is divided today: One third of us travel with passports (and know our declining global position), one third of us are passionate and unwavering Trump supporters, the final one third determines who will be elected in the next election.

Remember, Donald Trump was NOT a four year Ivy League graduate and he was not a top student. He was a third year transfer student into The Wharton School. When he graduated from University of Pennsylvania, he was not on the Deans List which was made up of the top 15% of his class the year he graduated. Please don’t let a fake Ivy League graduate who was not among the top 15% of his class fool you by making the White House a reality TV show. Get to know your neighbors and friends who have worldly experience and thrive by knowing your place in the world. Let’s do the right things and make this world a better place.

Moral Innovator proposal for changing the world – one child at a time

We are clearly seeing increasing violence both domestically within the USA and worldwide these days. While the call for peace and calm can help get these incidents out of the immediate news headlines, we need a sustainable morally innovative solution that can take several generations if adults elect to work together, or several centuries if we collectively focus on educating our children.

Today, about one third of humanity follows the Christian faith.  This trend started over 500 years ago when the corrupt Spanish Pope Alexander VI declared that Spain and Portugal owned the world outside Europe in the Tordesillas Treaty.  The first ones to contest this declaration were other European Christians who innovatively created the corrupt State-sponsored Dutch East India Company and the even more corrupt British East India Company to gather resources needed to industrialize the world.  We know, for example, it was the British government who gave monopoly power to the British East India Company that produced opium in India and sold the illicit drugs into China (and almost bankrupted the Chinese economy).  The immoral Japanese military also helped take over 70,000 tons of silver out of China through illegal distribution of opium.

Another 20% of humanity today follows the Muslim faith, and Islam is the world’s fastest growing faith.  Since the first OPEC price increase in 1973, our newly industrialized world developed an insatiable appetite for fossil fuel, and an average US$2 trillion dollars per year have been transferred to Muslims each year.  Each time we fill up our car with fuel, or turn on the air conditioner anywhere in the world, we contribute to the demand for fossil fuel and eventually maintain or sustain the status quo that transfers wealth to the Muslims.  Another impact is global climate change which is a by-product of our industrialization and exasperates the fact that we are 20,000 years into the 100,000 year Milankovitch cycle of global warming today.

On a global scale, our most severe conflict has been driven by the Christians’ and Muslims’ efforts to convert all humans.  Unless we create a way that allow humans to believe in both Christianity and Islam, there is no way humanity can have peace when two significant faiths strive to convert the entire humanity into one faith.  Within this framework, the declaration of independence by Israel in 1948 was like introducing a spark in a fuel tank.  While the role (and population) of Israel has been similar to Hong Kong for the British Protestant Christians during the opium war, USA has added plenty of oxygen to the spark in a fuel tank when President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq that spread the conflict between Christians and Muslims like forest fires.

Now is not the time to double down on our faith without reason.  We need to let our children thrive with knowledge of their places in the world in order to make the right decisions and make the world better.  Let us not baptize our infant children nor declare heaven belongs exclusively to any one faith,  claimed by both Christians and Muslims.  There is an alternative sustainable path to peace.

What is that alternative path?  We start with a very difficult challenge to understand and morally develop the age-appropriate motivations of our children.  In order to invoke the motivation hierarchy introduced by Abraham Maslow last century in a measurable way, let us try to map humanity into Maslow’s hierarchical layers of needs measured by wealth of humans.  We know that money cannot buy happiness, so these numbers should be modified by non-financial parameters:

1. Two billion (~30%) humans on earth living below poverty. The number one focus for these two billion humans is to secure food for survival.  This is Maslow’s physiological layer.
2. Five billion (~70%) humans seek safety through employment, police/fire protection, access to health care, investments, among other things. This is Maslow’s safety layer.
3. Twelve million (~0.1%) millionaires living on earth seek friendship and family, among other things. This is Maslow’s love/belonging layer.
4. 2,000 billionaires seek respect, confidence and achievements, among other things. This is Maslow’s esteem layer.  Donald Trump wants the US Presidency to try to excel in this layer.
5. Essentially no one is free of prejudice and take actions based on facts, possibly except the Gates Foundation supported by Warren Buffet. This is Maslow’s self-actualization layer.

These layers cut across all humanity (including Christians and Muslims) and exist everywhere on earth, including the USA, the largest economy on earth.  Trying to separate African Americans and Caucasian Americans will not work.  It is not a matter of “Black Lives Matter Too” versus “All Lives Matter.”  We need hope and opportunities that differ among humans living in different layers of Maslow’s hierarchy.

No line can be drawn for humans living in different layers of Maslow’s hierarchy.  However, we can provide opportunities for our children living in different layers of Maslow’s hierarchy to seek their aspirations through education.  As long as our children learn the universally accepted Golden Rule (do unto others what you want others to do unto you) and believe there is hope to achieve their aspirations, we gain trust to respect our second amendment rights to bear arms, while reducing violence between police and citizens.  By adding moral innovations to the education curriculum, indiscriminate shootings in school will decline when our children and adults have the Golden Rule in mind.

Changes should be visible when we add the Moral Innovations framework into our education curriculum, including the Golden Rule.  Please encourage our children to do the right things as they thrive with knowledge of their places in the world.

Focus on Opportunity when we mention diversity

Our business school professors and investment advisors teach us to diversify stocks in a portfolio to reduce risks.  The justification is higher profit for risked adjusted diverse portfolios.  How do we apply this concept to social sciences?

As a nation of immigrants, USA has a diverse population from South America, Asia, Africa and Europe with different moral values and faith within each ethnic community.  Over 150 years ago, the unspoken goal of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was to provide more opportunities for slaves.  Looking globally over time, the unwritten problem of India’s caste system has been the concrete barrier among the castes where anyone born within a caste like “soldiers” can never be anything else but soldiers of different ranks.  The fatal problem of communism has been the complete annihilation of economic incentives where no one wanted to hard work (and therefore evolved into Socialism where limited private economic ownership is allowed).  Today, we are still fighting for equal opportunity, with the underlying belief that our diversity delivers greater value than other countries around the world.

Within the USA today, we are divided by our emotions around “black lives matter” versus “all lives matter.”  We have bigger issues with our constitutionally protected right to bear arms and our ability to identify (mentally ill) terrorists to draw lines that cannot be drawn (and if drawn, cannot be enforced by law enforcement agencies).

Remove our emotions, and we find ourselves trapped heading in the wrong direction.  We are increasing our spending trillions of dollar every year increasing security at airports, police regional conflicts around the world, and build bigger law enforcement agencies.  For the next 4-8 years, our commander-in-chief is a choice between:  1) a follower of eugenics like Hitler who, as an offspring of immigrants himself, wants to build walls to exclude immigrants; and 2) an extremely careless career politician with a cheating husband.  How can we sustain our global leadership status with these choices?

To take advantage of our greater value of diversity, we need to know possible paths, or at least hope, to provide opportunities.  We cannot deny white males opportunities which the court has guided us in cases such as the Bakke reverse discrimination case in 1979, or deny Caucasians to become mayor of Washington DC where a majority of the population is African Americans.  Let us acknowledge Native American rights have been violated for centuries and help them address the alcohol addiction problem with jobs.  We have gone beyond our borders when we celebrate Columbus Day when Columbus never landed in the USA, or remember the Jewish Holocaust in a DC Museum when the holocaust did not happen in the USA.  It is time to address issues that did happen within the USA.  If we want to fight for fair trade or universal human rights across the globe, we should first have fair treatment of Americans within our borders.  Our law enforcement agencies cannot be effective without the support of the people within the communities they serve.  Our teachers cannot be effective if they do not teach our children 80% or more of the Native American population was annihilated within 200 years of the arrival of the Caucasians.  We should know that the population of Africa remained flat for 250 years between 1600 and 1850 when the population of the rest of the world more than doubled because millions of healthy male Africans were captured and sold into slavery around the world.  USA would not have industrialized without slaves because the cotton gin revolution required slave laborers to succeed.  Russia succeeded in industrialization when Stalin forced famine upon Ukraine and other parts of their economy.  China learned to focus on the power of the market economy to avoid a repeat of trying true Communism through their Cultural Revolution.  India is finding out democracy is the worst form of government, except there are none better.

Our children can learn and establish their own moral values, and our value of diversity will re-emerge.  This is not a political game.  We learn from each other, and the result will be fewer emotional outbursts that involve guns and deaths.  Ultimately, when we deliver opportunities for everyone to do what they want within our moral innovation framework, we will have harmonious societies.  Where do we find these communities?  Look at our schools:  There has been harmony at the graduate school level where American and foreign students have studied together for many decades.  Within the last decade, foreign students have increased significantly at the undergraduate level and within the last 5 years, at the high school level.  When we promote global education instead of concepts like “axis of evil,” we have opportunities to achieve harmony.  Don’t expect that building walls at the Mexican border or sending more military advisors into Afghanistan or Iraq will solve problems.  Global education is one of many sustainable action steps to reverse our current course of self-destruction.  Education that delivers opportunities for comfortable living/lifestyles is blind to bias and rewards hard work.  By expanding education at various levels,  we can also deliver hope to homeless veterans and poverty stricken victims who are more likely to be converted by extremists and candidates for suicide bombers.

Think “opportunities” when we talk about diversity which, by itself, cannot deliver harmony.