Film Made: Peace Economy

Overview
The Peace Studies Professor’s idea of a movie about Dr. Reuschlein being the next step was worth some thought. Perhaps he did not know there already is a movie about Dr. Reuschlein’s Peace Economics, made in 2010 by Film Studies emeritus Jackson Tiffany of the University of Wisconsin Madison. This is a great film to help people break out of the two dimensional thinking of 1) politics and 2) money about military spending and begin thinking through the 3) third dimension of the economic usefulness of military spending. The 4th dimension would be the whole empire concept and the 5th dimension would be the long term 54 year cycle. In short term thinking America, the last two dimensions are a hard sell. In fact, military spending does not create consumer products of any kind, making it a black hole of lost manufacturing and construction in the economy, leading to profound consequences other scholars have failed to analyze in any depth at all. This amazing new perspective is studied in eight key dimensions explaining the rise and fall of empires. This film completely changes the way we should look at the economy since World War II, especially the Great Recession and subsequent events. This 40 minute film is available from the realeconomy.com website for a $20 check, postpaid, including all shipping and taxes.

Beginnings
Every Monday at noon peace activists in Madison Wisconsin meet at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Doty Street. This is a good location one block away from the State Capitol and between the City and County buildings. One day I was downtown and decided to pass out some of my own flyers and ended up in a conversation with a bearded grey haired fellow with a hat that I had seen before at the Friends Meeting House. He had enjoyed one of my lectures a couple of years before on the “Twelve Stages of Empire” at the downtown public library. He had asked for a copy of the tape of that lecture and I had not gotten around to giving him that. This time he had an offer for me. He offered to make a ten minute video about my ideas, something he had done for other organizations. I agreed saying it needs to be fifteen or twenty minutes to get the material across well. He agreed to that. Little did I know I was going to be working with a retired Film Studies Professor from the University of Wisconsin.

Tapings
I called him later and agreed to come over to his house with eight of my best charts to begin taping. He started realizing the magnitude of the issues of Peace Economics, and agreed to more and more inclusions. He nixed one of my charts that he thought would be too hard to explain, but accepted the rest. We soon realized it was going to take longer and ended up with a forty minute dvd. Since most of the material had been accumulated over three decades, I agreed to a summary taping that would explain the twenty-first century part of the story, as the taping was completed in the summer of 2010. Jackson then added titles and other polish to the film.

Distribution
Jackson had a good idea who could produce the film economically. I could have a dvd in a packet with a dust cover for about 1000 for $1000. That made it very economical, but I wanted more. I decided to double the cost and include a 24 page booklet. The booklet has all the seven charts of material of the dvd on sixteen pages. Another eight pages of important ideas left out of the original film were added. This gave a cliff notes version of the ideas for easy review and to show others individual points. The structure was such that a chart could be on the left hand side of the fold and an explanation of the chart on the right hand side of the fold. Had I consumer tested this more, I would not have started with World War Two. Even though I refute the idea that the war pulled us out of the Depression, the conventional wisdom propaganda is too hard to overcome for some. I should have started with the next two charts instead, then eased into WWII later on. The 2011 dvd has never taken off like the paperback Peace Economics of 1986. Distribution of the dvd is only about 200 so far compared to the 3000 of the paperback. It is much easier to get a book into a book store than a dvd. But the newer work has much more new material than the original. It seems people want more words and less numbers and charts.

Actual copy of 24 page booklet enclosed with each video:
https://www.academia.edu/4108656/BOOKLET_for_Peace_Economics_11_charts_24p.

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Dr. Peace, Dr. Robert Reuschlein, Real Economy Institute, Madison, Wisconsin
CONTACT: bobreuschlein@gmail.com
INFO: http://www.realeconomy.com
MESSAGE: 608-230-6640

(Real Economy and/or Peace Economics free ebook for the press)
Archive of this two year long press release campaign at: https://bobreuschlein.wordpress.com/

Difficulty Along the Way

Overview
In hindsight, the development of Peace Economics has always been in a race against the increasingly strong forces of the dark side of empire. The 1984 election, when I was on the executive committee of the Democratic Party of Oregon, elected a delegate to the national convention, and later put on the electoral college slate, has always struck me as a complete vindication of George Orwell’s book “1984.” Yes, newspeak was alive and well with peacekeeper missiles in Europe. Reagan resuscitated the military industrial complex, busted the unions, and freed the rich from high tax rates, paving the way forward to today’s population control oriented national security state. Now Princeton and Jimmy Carter agree we no longer have a democracy, just an oligarchy, a plutocracy.

Beginnings
The 1983 brochure that launched Peace Economics lay quietly in my files while I fought that re-election, so two years later in 1985 I realized something was amiss. The newspapers showed no sign of Ruth Sivard’s brilliant work. When I took it to the next level, a county commissioner friend of mine offered to submit my work to the Pulitzer Prize committee. But someone named Matt threw me out of the Progressive Magazine offices in January 1986, so incapable was he of believing the military hurts the economy, because the New York Times said the opposite. But WORT put me on the radio, WISC on the TV, and the Capital Times put me in the newspaper. I met my old grade school principal at the World Federalists meeting I talked to. Later back home in Eugene Oregon, a friend lent me his MacIntosh to write my first book, then helped me settle on the term Peace Economics for the title. But going to a Rainbow Coalition meeting in DC, I sold a copy for $20 to a government employees union agent who never paid me. Then I sent a copy to the Journal of Peace Research in Oslo and was invited to send in an article. But I was afraid to even attempt the academic process then, and when I visited the offices in Oslo thirteen years later on my way to the Hague 100th Anniversary Peace Conference, editor Nels Petter Gledisch no longer knew who I was. In 1986 a friend insisted that my 99.7% correlation would be greeted by social scientists as evidence I did something wrong in my calculation. My reaction was to think the word “social” before the word scientist was like the word “social” before the word promotion. In 1987 I found a publisher, only to have him depart for another job and they refused to tell me where he had gone. His substitute did not understand me.

Early Academic World
In my first forays into the academic world, more mixed blessings. I followed the footsteps of a CPA who taught a class in Beyond War in the philosophy department, and used the Innovative Education department to teach in Sociology. I was friends with the department head and had taken courses from two of his three professors in political economy, so approval went smooth at first. I had ignored grading a football player listed as taking my class, since he never appeared, Then my department head friend went on sabbatical and I got an angry letter from his successor as I was teaching my second class. I was demanded not to publicly say that I was teaching a class at the university in the sociology department. Since I am so honest I never in my life have learned to tell a good lie, that letter baffled me. So I switched departments for my third class. Later the head of International Studies confided in me that people resented my work, even as he recognized that it was good work. Then he told me how he’d written papers on credentialism, so he recognized the exaggerated value of peer reviewed academic work. A friend of mine in the economics department knew I’d have trouble with conventional economics, so he recommended I give a paper to the Union of Radical Political Economists. I went there three years in a row, then a fourth time several years later. By now I had decided to get a doctorate in economics. But the head of MIT economics called Jay Forrester a charlatan in the business school, and I knew something was wrong with economics, for I found Forrester’s work very useful. Then the head of Oregon economics told be using data to create a model was cheating. Flabbergasted, I eventually figured out what he meant, but I knew that was not the scientific method to ignore data until after the model was created. By now I knew how treacherous the academic pursuit could be.

Since Then
Many angels have come to my aid, and many devils have bedeviled me in the years since the Cold War end also slowed Peace Economics down a lot too. And twenty years of putting Peace Economics on the back burner to make a living in accounting have ended. Now things are picking up for me again. Madison’s famous snobbery has held me back here, as I had a great reputation in Eugene. But I’m slowly gaining traction again. Unfortunately, the grip of empire on America has finally impinged the academic world, and the myth of the so-called conspiracy theory has allowed the national security state to get away with murder, so to speak. So I recommend the story of empire to help see what we are all up against. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Bush fiddled while New Orleans drowned, and the new barbarians seem to be the Tea Party extremists, eagerly destroying many a great American institution like the Universities.

Stages of Empire Decay:
https://www.academia.edu/5415354/STAGES_of_EMPIRE

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Dr. Peace, Dr. Robert Reuschlein
Real Economy Institute
Madison, Wisconsin
best contact to ask Bob to speak to your group: bobreuschlein@gmail.com
to leave message: 608-230-6640
for more info: http://www.realeconomy.com
(Real Economy and/or Peace Economics free pdf on request by members of the press)
An archive of this two year long press release campaign can be found at:

Difficulty Along the Way

Reuschlein World View

Overview
Since 1978 I have watched the news and politics as my top priority. Since writing Peace Economics in 1986 my own view of the world has changed drastically. My jaw is dropping and my eyes are rolling constantly when I see the limited view of the mainstream, especially what I call the “Flat Earth” economists. All of them are flat earth economists except me. This is not to be confused with Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat.”  His concept of flat earth is completely different than mine. By flat earth, I mean never seriously acknowledging the enormous role military spending plays in stagnating the economy and creating the declining empire situation. Virtually no one else sees the vast changes coming over American society in the last few decades as a direct result of high military spending. As a result, virtually no one sees that the conditions are reversible if we keep military spending low (or at least at a comparable level to the rest of the world in terms of proportion of the nation’s economy). As a result, the entire political debate is Flat Earth, even among those who would reduce military spending such as the Democrats, Hillary or Bernie, and the Rand Paul libertarians.

Numbers or Words
I am governed in my analysis by the numbers, like the hard science of my first degree in engineering. The social sciences, including economics, are governed by words. So I have a hard time finding a peer review group that is appropriate to the paradigm shift of turning macroeconomics into a hard science rather than a social science. Because of the sweeping nature of the changed perspectives I bring, I am reluctant to give my copyrights away by publishing my material piecemeal in journals of social science. So I am looking for a book publisher where I bring all the material together, and increasing I’m inclined to follow the path of Mark Twain into self publishing. That creates its own prejudices, as the New York Times book review section will not cover self published books, and the pejorative “vanity press” is used to unfairly stigmatize such works. Librarians consider works not peer reviewed as lesser works. Waiting two years to get published is common in peer reviewed work. I would gladly submit my work to peer review if I can help put together the peer review committee, perhaps sort of a second dissertation, an interdisciplinary dissertation. My work is freely shared in what approaches some hundred conferences now, half pre doctorate and half during and after the doctorate, and another hundred press releases in my two year press release campaign.

Examples of Conventional Blind Spots:

ECONOMIC DECAY
Most critics of military spending concentrate on either the huge cost or the human cost. They fail to see that empires decline with high military spending as a few historians have noted. My finding that military spending correlates -.997 with lower manufacturing productivity growth among nine leading developed countries and also correlates -.993 with lower capital investment levels among five leading developed countries both tend to prove the statement that military spending is non productive. That leads directly to decline and centers in a disappearing manufacturing sector. Conventional thinking blames trade for all the job loss in manufacturing, but that does not square with the increased manufacturing in the low military WTO and NAFTA Clinton years. Not until the military buildup in the two years after 9-11 do 2.8 million manufacturing jobs disappear. Conventional wisdom blames the Great Recession on a mortgage banking problem. They fail to see the supercharged housing market caused by depleting resources from the inland manufacturing areas and transferring them to the military monetary coastal areas of the country. This same dynamic led to a similar savings and loan bailout in the Reagan years. I am unaware of anyone noticing this similarity other than me.
See economic details: https://www.academia.edu/4108656/BOOKLET_for_Peace_Economics

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

SOCIAL DECAY
When the empire ends, many note the widespread internal decay, but no one seems to connect this to the military economic cause except me. Others claim other causes such as Jared Diamond’s claim of environment as a leading cause or Gibbons claim that Christianity destroyed Rome. My finding that crime and murder correlate .996 with military spending during the seventies eighties and nineties for five major developed countries begins to connect military spending as the prime cause of internal decay. It also explains the drop in crime in the nineties, something none of today’s criminologists have a plausible explanation for (Chris Hayes show December 2014). That is reinforced by the Spirit Level statistics comparison between income inequality as a prime cause of internal decay and my military spending correlation on the same factors. Five of the nine factor index by Wilkinson and Puckett show a much higher average correlation for military spending over income inequality by .82 to .69. These are the five highest correlating factors for either cause, except for social mobility where both factors are virtually tied at .92 for military spending and .93 for income inequality.
See crime details: https://www.academia.edu/4862977/CRIME_and_the_Military

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

POLITICAL DECAY
Most conventional analysts blame money for corrupting our politics. But I ask, which came first, the onset of empire or the onset of money politics? Clearly empire came first, and Reagan is the “emperor” who untaxed the rich, rebuilt the military and destroyed the unions. A longer term view will clearly show that we lost our postwar monopoly over the world in the fifties, the steel industry in the sixties, much of the auto industry in the seventies, much of the unions in the eighties, campaign costs exploding for thirty years now even before the 2010 Citizens United decision. And we went off the Gold Standard in 1971. Individually cases can be made for these events separately, but combined, only advanced stage of decline of empire explains them all. Just as Rome went from a republic of the Senate to an Emperor system, so too America has gone from a republic to the current plutocracy with an Imperial Presidency. Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Bush fiddled while New Orleans drowned. And the Tea Party of the Koch brothers forms the new barbarians.
Details: https://www.academia.edu/5415354/STAGES_of_EMPIRE

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

GLOBAL WARMING PAUSE
The new fifth report of the IPCC last September 2014 could not explain the fifteen year pause in global warming from 1998 to 2013. That is because while they have 200 specialties, they do not include mine. Back in 1991 I connected the natural 54 year cycle to the economic (Kondratiev 1926) cycle to the war cycle (Goldstein 1987). More recently Klyashtorin’s work on ice cores shows a strong 55 year cycle over the period 553 to 1973. Using 14 temperature data sets and 2 precipitation data sets over the three year period after the 1988 drought, I figured out the causal patterns and connecting mechanisms to both verify the existence of the 54 year cycle as well as explain the how and why of it. So I knew that from roughly 1994 to 2021 there would be a global warming pause as the ocean catches up with the warming cycle that begins on land. In cycles past, this would be a twenty year gap from one global warming peak year to the next. In the current cycle this has become a sixteen year gap from 1998 to 2014.              Cycle details:  https://www.academia.edu/6002772/WEATHER_CYCLE

Top Press Release, with 5700 views, about 10 Military Domestic Effects:
https://www.academia.edu/12755188/Military_Domestic_Effects_list_of_10

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Current version of the class I have created to teach this ground breaking material:
Cover Letter, Proof of Concept, Nine Areas of Mastery, Creating Model, 31 Class Sessions:
https://www.academia.edu/11786950/FRAMEWORK_For_Academic_Class_six_pages_2015

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Dr. Peace, Dr. Robert Reuschlein
Real Economy Institute
Madison, Wisconsin
best contact to ask Bob to speak to your group: bobreuschlein@gmail.com
to leave message: 608-230-6640
for more info: http://www.realeconomy.com

Economics or Engineering

Overview
The question was asked of me, what is the difference between me and other economists. The Nobel Prize winning Economist Leontiff said it best. 97% of economic articles are articles about other economic articles. Only 2.5% are economic models, and only 0.5% are basic research. I’m in the last two categories that only one in thirty three articles are involved in. So I am an economic engineer, a scientist, not an economist as currently defined.

Numbers or Words
I am governed by the intelligent use of numbers rather than the extensive use of words. 90% of people are numbers phobic; I am among the rare 10% who love numbers.
For those who love words, this is a very good one page summary of the military findings:
https://www.academia.edu/12755188/Military_Domestic_Effects

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.
For lovers of numbers, the best one page summary of my work is this: https://www.academia.edu/4044456/SUMMARY_Military_DisEconomics

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Experience of Economics
Economists use numbers and charts a lot, but few of them are very good at it. They are very good at ad hoc explanations and inductive reasoning. Even when considering macro topics they are very micro about it. They insist on building with basics like supply and demand. Unwittingly, they don’t really trust the markets to clear things in such a way that long term principles govern what is happening. Monetarists insist that a short term stimulus will be “paid for” in a few years with retrenchment. This ignores the dominant world economy central value of the dollar making the payback cycle irrelevant to modern macroeconomics. Yes, the US economy can run deficits for many many years without negative consequences. But the real consequences are not in the money economy, they are in the working people economy. What you work on is the more important variable. Thus if you aim the scientists engineers and capital at the real economy you will grow. If you do this at the military economy you lack any real economic goods output and have to settle for intimidation or destruction or mostly irrelevance for your political output. Don’t be fooled by the inputs to the military industrial complex by the weapons manufacturers, that is not real output, that is used in a process that yields political outcomes not economic goods. Inputs are not outputs. This is not me being political, this is how I interpret the unbelievably accurate models that come out of my scientific process.

Study of Economics
One economist, after an unsuccessful run for congress, told a group of moderate Republicans that everyone should have a class or two in economics. But more than that, and economists get too specialized and can’t see the forest for the trees. Three department heads of leading economic programs have told me some shocking truths about economics. One called Jay Forrester, the great inventor of system dynamics, a charlatan, for teaching about long cycle economics in the business department of the same institution as the economist. Another told me that creating a model out of the historical data was cheating. It would be if your model was the ridiculous econometric modeling process of 50 equations of three or four variables each. In that I agree. But if your model has three basic variables and two collapse variables as mine does, you can actually create a model out of historical data much like the standard scientific method of the physicists. You don’t have to turn the scientific method on its head like that economist and reject models built on historical facts. The third department head, just this year, told me that microeconomics is a good science but macroeconomics is not of much value to the modern economist. I couldn’t agree more about the current state of the art. But that ignores the transformative nature of my work as an economic engineer.

Favorite Economists
Joseph Stiglitz is my favorite current economist. Alone among the leading economists of our time, he seems to “get it” about Peace Economics. He wrote a column for a British newspaper that explained how the nineties settled the dispute once and for all, that lower military spending is good for the economy. I have seen his explanation of the World War II economy also reflect the understanding that the war economy of that time was limited in its effectiveness. This contrasts with Paul Krugman, who gives credit to the war economy for bringing America out of the Great Depression in one of his books. Larry Summers is the worst, immediately attacking Seymour Melman after a speech at MIT. Seymour Melman had carefully explained how the military economy hurts economic growth of the country, but Larry Summers thought otherwise. When Obama chose Larry Summers to be his economic advisor, he made a huge mistake. That mistake probably led to Obama’s moving war funding from Iraq to Afghanistan. Instead, he should have reduced military spending to free up engineers and capital for the recovery. By mistakenly keeping those key resources in the military, that led to the very slow economic recovery. Unfortunately, the financial economists argued that the economic recovery was slow because financial recessions are always that way. This then armed Larry Summers with an excuse for maintaining a high military budget. Still, as the military budget has retrenched somewhat, the recovery has picked up somewhat. The record breaking snowfall in New England has hurt the first quarter economy. As a dry cleaning executive for many years, I noticed the seasonal slumps for the July August summer heat and the January February winter snows.

Military Economists
Seymour Melman was the leading economist against military spending. His major mistake was putting the blame narrowly on the weapons manufacturers, not recognizing that all of military spending resembles a factory, so we are not just losing assembly line equipment, we also lose blue collar skilled workers. Democrats make the same mistake, taking the side of the troop funding against weaponry funding. All of it is an economic loss.

Marion Anderson looked at jobs in the Reagan military buildup, giving a poor explanation for the State of Washington slump in the early eighties. The correct variable is military spending, not jobs, as capital investment is the lost opportunity cost.

Anne Markusen of Rutgers is good as far as she goes, but lacks the imagination and political side of the process to fully understand the military spending consequences.

Ruth Leger Sivard of “World Military and Social Expenditures” did the critical work that began my own process, but she did not follow through with the endless tests I used to flesh out the theory in all its detail.

Top Press Release, with 5700 views, about 10 Military Domestic Effects:
https://www.academia.edu/12755188/Military_Domestic_Effects_list_of_10

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Current version of the class I have created to teach this ground breaking material:
Cover Letter, Proof of Concept, Nine Areas of Mastery, Creating Model, 31 Class Sessions:
https://www.academia.edu/11786950/FRAMEWORK_For_Academic_Class_six_pages_2015

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Dr. Peace, Dr. Robert Reuschlein
Real Economy Institute
Madison, Wisconsin
best contact to ask Bob to speak to your group: bobreuschlein@gmail.com
to leave message: 608-230-6640
for more info: http://www.realeconomy.com