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 Fareed Zakaria's book "The Earth 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  Librarians consider works not peer reviewed as lesser works.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 lead 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

SOCIAL DECAY

When the empire ends, many not 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

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

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

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