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Robert Bivona

Since my early teens in the 1960s, I have been aware of the advantages of having wealth in gaining more and the wealthy’s disproportionate influence on our political system. Each decade since then, economic inequality and our political system’s corruption by wealthy individuals and corporations have grown more grotesque.

Also since my teens, it seemed to me that a society where maximizing business profits motivates economic activity would inevitably be dysfunctional. In pursuit of maximum profits, private actors will too often ignore resulting public harm. The environmental contamination in the 1950s and 1960s made this defect obvious. Extremely polluted air harmed the health of tens of millions of Americans, and some toxic rivers ignited into flames. The profit motive and a political system corrupted by corporations and wealthy individuals resulted in these conditions.

Among the other characteristics of modern-day capitalism I never felt I could comfortably conform to is one where people earn a living by subordinating themselves to “bosses.” Also in my early teens, I was aware of neighbors whose social contributions far exceeded others with much higher incomes. Since then, the disconnect between social contribution and rewards has grown more obvious and extreme. Its incongruous character I describe in my books with many examples.

Despite my long-term interest in developing policy responses to systemic defects creating increasingly severe social problems, several decades passed before I detailed some because in my teens and twenties I pursued a more intense interest in science and mathematics. Although not directly related to my later focus on economics and politics, my formal educational and professional background developed the analytical skills I needed to write The New Enlightenment and Amazon as Metaphor.

I was excited to study physics at the college level after being introduced to the subject in high school. But as the process proceeded, I found it stifling. Professors would give equations such as the Schrödinger equation and show how physical systems will behave using it with too little emphasis on the creative process that resulted in the equation. I was interested in solving the problems professors assigned on determining physical system’s behavior, but I was more interested in the creative process that led to the problem-solving techniques.

I did not proceed with my education in physics immediately after receiving my Bachelors’s degree in 1975. Instead, I found employment as a “Lab Coordinator” in a physics teaching lab of a university. It involved setting up and maintaining lab equipment and assisting lab instructors. It was a 20 hour per week job, so I established a math and physics tutoring service to supplement my income. My clients were mainly high school students whose parents paid for the tutoring sessions. After about a year as lab coordinator, I began taking graduate courses in physics part-time, a free benefit of employment.

After witnessing the energy crisis of 1979 and early 1980s—the second major oil crisis within a decade—cause major social disruption from long gas lines (in some cases five miles long) and skyrocketing prices, my interest grew in a career change. It seemed to me I could make the best use of my technical skills by gaining expertise in designing and performance predicting alternative energy systems and energy conservation measures for buildings. Further motivating this desire were the incorrect predictions of “pundits” that the world would likely run out of sufficient qualities of oil to continue using it as an energy source within a few decades. I viewed active and passive solar systems, photovoltaics, and energy conservation as solutions to the reported oil supply crisis. Their environmental advantages added to their appeal. (However, at the time, I did not fully understand the significance of fossil fuels’ use in global warming.)

Some engineering firms offered design and economic analysis services for building energy conservation and alternative energy measures; after taking a few classes in the subjects at local universities, I succeeded in gaining employment at one. I was relegated to a cubicle like most of the other engineers and given projects to work on, mostly in isolation.

I didn’t particularly appreciate working at the engineering company, and it made me aware I had too large a deficiency of knowledge in the field. So, I sought the best educational program in designing and analyzing building energy conservation and alternative energy measures and decided it was a graduate program at Arizona State University. I applied, was accepted, and left my birthplace, the New York state region, for the first time for the very different environment of Arizona. While in the program, oil prices dropped 40% from their highs, the supply shortage seemed to be resolved, and within a couple of years, prices declined 80% from their highs. As a result, work in the solar and energy conservation field was scarce.

Since Arizona adjoined a state I had wanted to see for most of my life, California, I visited, and the beauty and climate (including cultural) of the northern California coast caused me to cancel my plans to return to New York and relocate to Marin County, CA, a suburb of San Fransisco. I established a tutoring service and soon also found work as a part-time consultant to a company that helped architects and contractors meet the California energy conservation code. The company paid me $20 per hour and charged clients $60 per hour for my work (this was the mid-1980s), so I started my own company providing the same services to architects and contractors directly. Also, I assisted a company in performing detailed comparative energy performance analyses of various energy conservation measures for large commercial buildings using a sophisticated computer program (DOE-2) that I learned how to use at ASU.

Eventually I longed for involvement with physics again in an academic setting and found employment as a lab manager at a major university. I supervised a staff of six part-time students in setting up equipment for the undergraduate physics teaching labs and lecture demonstrations, repaired or supervised the repair of the equipment, and assisted lab instructors. I wrote chapters of revised lab manuals, designed some equipment instructors used in the labs and lecture demonstrations, and managed a major expansion and move of the labs to a new building.

From 2010 through 2016, I devoted myself full-time to the research for and writing of 2017 released book, The New Enlightenment. I was highly motivated to write it. Our economic and political systems have been widening the chasm between our professed ideals of democracy, liberty, and justice for all and our reality for decades. Ignorance of significant facts, faulty ideas, and corruption among political and economics professionals contributed to the widening. I viewed our social decline trends as inevitably leading to social disintegration without a social movement dedicated to creating a fundamentally more democratic, egalitarian, and just society based on some new, unconventional ideas.

In 2019, I began work on the research for and writing of my book, Amazon as Metaphor that I finished in 2023. My visions of the societal advancements we needed (and need) were clear, and I felt compelled to express them. My two books detail fundamental economic and political system reforms and why we need them. If instituted, they would create a far more just and better-functioning society.

Robert Bivona

Industry	Decline in Number
Small construction firms	15,000
Small manufacturers	> 70,000
LocaL retailers	108,000 (40% decline)
Community banks, credit unions	13,000 (50% decline)

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STEPHEN A. BEZRUCHKA

Sarah Hernandez

Thomas Gray

Stephen Bezruchka

Carmine Gorga

Bill Barry

James Haslam

DOUG LOWNDES

SARAH HERNANDEZ

THOMAS W. GRAY

CARMINE GORGA

Robert Bivona

BILL BARRY

JAMES HASLAM

Devastating Economic System Dysfunction

The Black-White Wealth Gap

The Decline of Small Businesses

Let’s “assemble with all the coolness of philosophers, and set [our Constitution] to rights.”

Doug Lowndes