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Some Personal Posts for Family and Friends

Biography of Mason A. Clark

Born in the north woods of the nation's most beautiful state, Wisconsin. But at home in the magnificent Kickapoo valley of southwest Wisconsin. Grew up between a corn field and an apple orchard on the northwest Chicago city limit (one mile and thirty years from Hilary's home).

Four years in the U.S. Navy; taught radio at Chicago primary school for radio/radar technicians; then was the Chief Electronic Technicians Mate of Torpedo Squadron 4.
Here is a book about VT4 by one of the pilots.

Graduated in electrical engineering and physics at Northwestern University.

Bell Telephone Laboratory (Murray Hill, New Jersey) : supervisor of power-transistor and microwave-diode development.

Pacific Semiconductors (a TRW affiliate in Culver City, Calif.) : Manager of Product Development
Pictorial history of high-frequency power-transistor development.

Early Power Transistor History by Joe Knight

Moved to the formerly beautiful Santa Clara Valley of California, once a valley of fruit orchards, now widely known as the Silicon Valley. Some say it's still beautiful. Some say it's too damned expensive to live here. They're right but after 40 years it grows on you.

HPA, a Hewlett-Packard associate company : Manager of Product Development

Microwave Associates West, Inc. : Vice-president (semiconductor operation)

In quasi retirement

My Economics Ideology

On 28 Feb 1996 I posted this explanation of my attitude about economics:

We have different perceptions of the problem being discussed. So from the same data we reach different conclusions. Then get in a fight over it. The story of the blind men describing an elephant after each touching a different part of the elephant.

Let me make clear my concern, overstated for clarity:

I have no interest - zero interest - in the general economic situation as represented by the unemployment rate, the trade balance, or any other aggregated data. References to them seem silly to me. I can't comprehend why they are being mentioned.

I do have a strong interest in the circumstances of the bottom quintile - or pick a percentage - of the population. I do have a strong interest in layed-off, long-time, "loyal" employees who have committed to the tasks of a company, are therefore poorly equipped for other tasks, and are in difficult circumstances.

I do have a strong interest in the population dependent on, and perhaps crippled by the blunders of the welfare state; and the population not adequately trained for employment.

My interest is purely self-serving: I don't want to be robbed or shot by a robber. I admit my own personality flaw, i.e. if I were in one of the groups mentioned above, I would get a big gun, join a gang, and feed myself rather than depend on welfare. I empathize with the young black males in the U.S., with the newly laid-off, with the unemployables, with those who struggle below the poverty level (however defined), and with those who migrate into the U.S. to escape worse poverty.

In a modern, well-armed nation revolution does not occur by the storming of the Bastille, it occurs by shots heard in the streets, by schools too dangerous to attend, by a growing prison population too expensive to maintain, by the collapse of safety nets. And by the rise to power of the radical right or the radical left. And that, gang, is revolution.

So respond to my posts with no general statistics - they sound evasive, plutocratic; simply silly in the context of my perception of the problems. And by plutocratic I mean that I sense that the arguments are being made by economically secure, perhaps wealthy, perhaps tenured, well-meaning citizens who would - if not embarrassed to do so - say "let them eat cake."

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