Jon Amsden

I am a Cornell graduate who has worked in the Welfare Department of New York City, received my doctorate in Economics from the London School of Economics, and then taught at the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Metiers (Paris) and at UCLA as a visiting professor. After I had worked with student groups and UCLA staff members to organize the campus workers into one big union, I was politely asked to go and visit elsewhere. What followed in time was that I took courses in math and science at Santa Monica College with the possibility of becoming a medical student in mind. Instead, I became a writer and a writing instructor through the creation of The Writers Coach which may be visited at thewriterscoach.com. Since then, I have written books on: the role of the precious metals in the history of money and banking; on the history of the conquest of Mexico; on the history of the planet Earth and its mass extinctions; and, most recently, of the many empires in the Western world that arose to dominate the societies around them then only to decline as human society moved through several phases of energy production marking human history (muscle power, wind and water, steam, and internal combustion) that I have referred to as the “thermodynamic signature of society.” In recent times I have become interested in the problems and possibilities of creating an adequate water supply for California in general, and for the City of Santa Monica in particular. To learn more, please contact me at thewriterscoach@verizon.net.