Remaking America by George Shollenberger, Idea XI (The U.S. Economy Is Filled With Too Many Unknowns)

Today, economists are guiding the economic life of the people in every nation. Yet, the colleges and universities throughout the world have no predictive economic science to teach students. Accordingly, the minds of economists are filled only with ‘unknowns.’ So, all economists are like the past dictators who made man slaves. All free nations thus have a common and major problem. My work in science might explain how this problem became a reality.

In 1947, I graduated from high school with a love for mathematics and with honors in basketball from the State of Pennsylvania. Like other boys, I enlisted in the Army Security Agency to gain GI Rights to attend college. Unfortunately, President Truman eliminated the Bill a month after I enlisted. So, after I was discharged and went to college for a year, I had to move to Philadelphia where I could begin night school. After nine years, I received a degree in science from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) while working at Martin Marietta Corp. on the Cold War and JFK’s moon-landing project.

Night school has benefits because science is always making big advances and JHU filled my mind with very advanced mathematics in electrical engineering. I became nationally known when I shifted the field of telemetry from analog into digital. This shift eventually created new corporations such as Intel and Microsoft and the new digital TV today.

My science and technology(S&T) work continued to grow after President Nixon slowed down the space program and increased funding to solve domestic problems. I was hired by the Nixon Administration to help solve the rising crime problem. In 1971, I had a $3.2 million research budget. My S&T work continued until President Carter won the White House. Under Carter, our social work expanded and my S&T work decreased. Because social science is taught with statistics and because I knew mathematics, in 1977 I was asked to measure the performance of our research program. This measurement was important because inflation was rising under President Ford and would rise to a double digit under Carter.

The measurement of a government agency would become my first research work on economics where ‘supply’ is tangible (e.g., countable money) and the ‘demand’ is intangible (uncountable services). Interestingly, in the 1970s, the number of U.S. service businesses was increasing faster than the number of product businesses. So, in the 1970s, our politicians knew that the quality of the U.S. economy was changing. But the politicians did not take any action in response to this economic change. I found that the performance of our agency must be measured relativistically, the same way that Einstein viewed space.

So, I conclude that debates between the Democrats and Republicans on economics have been wasted ever since the 1970s. So, the legislative branch of the U.S. government is currently dysfunctional. Today, this problem seems to exist in many other nations.