Joy In Suffering

As you may know, I might write a book on St. James’s verse about considering our sufferings ‘pure joy’, because one of the most challenging things to discern in a world full of suffering is why we should consider it ‘pure joy’ and the difficulty in doing so. Because if in all things God works for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28), then our suffering is a gift, especially in the long run, even when it’s prohibitively difficult at the time to see why. As someone who has been through immense suffering in the past 3 years, I believe I have become equipped with some of the understanding and experience to enable me to have this perspective, yet still always with so much more to learn, of course.

I think the main reason suffering doesn’t feel like joy or a gift is because at the time it is laden with many tangible costs and few tangible benefits. But that’s because with the right approach the costs are part of the process of dying of self to better things; the death of hubris ushers in the emergence of greater humility; the death of self-reliance gives rise to the emergence of deeper strength; the death of self-image gives rise to the emergence of Divine focus; the death of entitlement ushers in the emergence of deep gratitude; the death of fear gives rise to the emergence of stronger faith and more intense devotion, that sort of thing.

It’s one of the key parts of Jesus’ teaching regarding losing our life to find it (John 12:24-25), and denying ourselves by taking up our cross and following Him (Luke 9:23-24). It’s only through the gradual death to self that we find life, and it’s only through suffering that we begin to understand the necessity of the gradual death to self. 

 

On The Trinity

I haven’t read anything by the Christian philosopher and theologian Richard Swinburne, but I know he posited a famous defence for the Trinity on the grounds that with the three-person God, where God is perfectly loving, He needs to be triune so you have each person loving the others, and each pair jointly loving the third. The thinking goes that if God were just one person, He couldn’t be essentially loving unless He had someone to love - which would make love dependent on creation. And mutual love between two persons of God is good, but not the highest form of love, because the highest love requires two persons jointly loving a third in a self-giving, cooperative way. Consequently, a three person God is both the minimum needed (as per above) and the maximum (because anything additional is superfluous).

Now, I’m of the school that says God is so far beyond our comprehension that speculating about the precise nature of God as triune is a bit like …I don’t know….a chimpanzee speculating on the equations in quantum theory. But that’s ok, it’s fun to speculate, and we are loved by God and made in His image, so I’ll share some thoughts.

I do think it’s probably right that God must be a Trinity - three persons - because perfect love requires mutual love (at least two persons), and shared, cooperative love (at least three persons). And it’s probably compelling that those two types of love are also fundamental to the three most powerful loves in the world; marital love, parental love and love between friends.

But I also think we have to be smart enough to see that the Trinity as described in scripture is (like a lot of scripture) the most simplistic way that humans can get a limited sense of who God is and what He is like. In other words, we know that in describing God as three persons, one God, we mean that somehow He is tri-aspectual (three aspects of one God) and that the Trinity is God's way of revealing Himself in scripture in a way we can grasp - allowing us to understand aspects of His nature. Apart from what we can discern through scripture, through the Incarnation where the Word became flesh, and through our own relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit, we perhaps only understand God as tri-aspectual in the same way that a foetus tries to understand its mother - surrounded by her, sustained by her, hearing the rhythm of her heart, yet unable at this stage to comprehend the fullness of her being.

It is at that level that we can comprehend God as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each is fully God, not a part or a third of God - and where they are distinct in relation, not in nature or power. Perhaps the most helpful way to think of this - in admittedly very limited human form - is that of a single music chord; it is made of three notes sounding at once, and each note is fully itself, fully part of the chord, yet the chord isn’t the chord without all three. There's unity, diversity, and shared essence - and that might be a little like how we can sense God as triune, and how His triune nature invites us to love Him even more deeply.

We might even glimpse something compelling in the way God describes us: as His friend (John 15:15), His bride (Isaiah 62:5), and His child (1 John 3:1). Perhaps these are more than metaphors - they may be the ideal descriptors to echo the mutual, self-giving love within the Trinity itself - a love so complete and overflowing that it gives rise to the three most powerful forms of love we know: friendship, covenantal marital love, and the bond of family. These aren’t just ways we relate to God - they’re reflections of how God, in His very being, relates within Himself and then with us.

 

The Philosophy of Miracles

In a recent article, I defined a miracle as an event that requires action from God because it defies the natural laws or scientific explanation within His creation. I argued that miracles are everywhere, and that they are one of the best arguments for the truth of Christianity. Now I’d like to follow up with a philosophical piece that considers what it’s like for a sceptic who has never experienced a miracle, and the thought process that will hopefully aid their evaluation.

When it comes to miracles, an open-minded agnostic has two sets of propositions to consider.

Here is the first set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Christians claim to have experienced miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles occur.

Here is the second set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Atheists claim to have experienced no miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur.

Let’s unpack how we can arrive at the best conclusion about which set is most likely. Using the well-known Popperian black swan problem, the situation with miracles works like this. In philosophy of science, a “black swan” is something that seems impossible or extremely unlikely because it has never been observed - like how Europeans once believed all swans were white until black swans were discovered. The discovery of even one black swan overturned what people thought they knew. In the same way, when Christians testify that miraculous events occur, they are essentially saying that “black swans” exist - relatively infrequent events that challenge ordinary expectations. Remember, as noted in the previous article, these events are only infrequent relative to the enormous number of non-miraculous events that occur; they are frequent relative to the sceptic’s assumption that they do not occur at all. Unbelievers argue that since they’ve never seen such events, miracles probably don’t exist, much like someone who assumes all swans are white simply because they’ve never encountered a black one.

Starting from scratch, the empirical evaluation can be undertaken as follows. Statements that insist that black swans do exist cannot be falsified without a rigorous search throughout the whole swan domain to confirm that there are no black swans. But although showing that black swans exist is not easily falsified, their existence is more easily verified, because one example of a black swan is sufficient to verify the statement. Assigning a universal property to all items of a set and decreeing all swans are white can be falsified by one black swan. The trouble is, where the statement ‘all swans are white’ is relatively easy to falsify, in most empirical investigations it is not so easily verified, because the whole swan domain must be searched and checked before the statement “all swans are white” can claim to be verified.

Furthermore, one can seldom fully verify or falsify claims of a miraculous nature from the outside, because our observations are mediated through complex and variable conditions, through inward phenomenological experiences, and through a host of anomalous events that fall beyond the reach of ordinary empirical investigation. This difficulty is especially clear when we recall that verifying the proposition “black swans exist” requires only the observation of a single black swan - something straightforward in uncomplicated empirical science - whereas verifying the proposition “miraculous events exist” cannot be observed through quite the same straightforward process, since it requires us to probe a vast, complex, and often inaccessible domain of human experience.

The statement ‘all swans are white’ is testable by being falsifiable, yet it should also be remembered that deductive falsification is not the same as proposing an absence of verification. In order to comprehensively falsify a grand sweeping claim, one must compress all this hard to manage data into a true falsifying singular statement, and sceptics who do not wish to believe tend to dismissively shade over into selectively proactive induction as the objects they deal with get more complex, intractable and inaccessible. The epistemological pathways for miracles are not converged upon by this method because they are usually highlighted by a few known dots, which can be joined by large tracts of inference and a proactive search, rather like when one visits a single Internet web page with just a few search tags typed into a search engine.

Given that there is a fairly large degree of asymmetry when one compares empirical science and the establishing of evidence of the miraculous, the swan domain is best used analogically as a sense-making interpretive structure that seeks to piece together numerous testimonies and anecdotal claims (the more the better) and consider a more innovative method of investigation into the miraculous than most sceptics currently employ.

Because miraculous events, unless experienced first-hand, are not easily comprehended through standard empirical methods that rely on observing patterns and drawing general conclusions, one of the hardest things for unbelievers to apprehend is that the full scope of created reality, with its intractable and inaccessible web of human experiences and divine intervention, does not offer an easy epistemological route to explaining everything naturally. Instead, comprehending such events requires a methodology where one infers and evaluates the experience against their own background to determine if it is truly miraculous by the above definition.

Clearly, given that the miraculous seems to be a dish that is only consumed by those who experience it first-hand, we can be sympathetic as to why unbelievers remain unsatisfied with second-hand testimonies. However, sceptics must be careful not to quarantine themselves from investigation by adopting an attitude that allows them to hastily dismiss all anecdotal evidence as unsatisfactory and preclude themselves from proactive investigation. When God does act miraculously in people’s lives, one thing is abundantly clear, if you do not adopt some proactive search or radical thought process that brings you into contact with the real nature of the investigation, the chances of you finding this truth are seriously minimised.

To summarise at this point, the problem for unbelievers is that they cannot be sure that no black swans exist unless they know for sure that miracles are impossible, and they cannot know that miracles are impossible unless they are sure that there are no such things as black swans. Christians do not face the same epistemological problems because many (if not most) have experienced some kind of miracle that has demonstrated to their satisfaction that God is active in their life. Naturally, the unbeliever may claim that the Christians are using a debatable explanatory filter that defaults to intelligent agency as the best explanation of such events, but as I said in the first article, the Christian can rightly insist on two powerful things; 1) that the unbeliever has no experience of the Holy Spirit, so is not rightly placed to discern the miraculous; and 2) that miracles are everywhere if you know where to look, and remain one of the very best arguments for Christianity’s truth.

If an enquirer’s first steps lead him into huge sense-making structures that attempt to embed a very wide degree of life into a grand creation story narrative, where Christ is recognised as the Creator and sustainer, then he will undoubtedly find it gets more exciting the further he gets into it.  As above, a search engine only needs a few key search words to sift out a few web pages from millions - so, in principle, if this venture into the miraculous is seen as a join-the-dots experiment (that may well involve a lifetime of growth), a few dots may be enough to put one on a solid conceptual footing to begin the adventure.

All this shows why, between the consideration of the two sets - set 1 there's a reasonable chance that miracles occur, or set 2 there's a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur - set 1 is astronomically more likely than set 2. Even aside from the positive reasons to believe in miracles cited in the previous article, on philosophical grounds too, set 1 ought to seem more reasonable to an open-minded agnostic than set 2, because if miracles occur by virtue of God performing them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then you'd expect that in the vast majority of cases, Christians are the only people to have experienced miracles in terms of God's providence. But equally, if miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then it is to be expected that most atheists have not experienced a miracle that would convince them that miracles, and ultimately God, exist.

Therefore, given the astronomically high number of claims of the miraculous in the world, you'd expect set 1 to have a higher probability of being the right set of propositions than set 2. Much like, if there were a group of people in the world who couldn't see the colour red, you'd expect them to be the people claiming there are no such thing as a red experience, even though a lot of other people are claiming to have had them.

And one final point that I think is vitally important but so often neglected. Miracles won’t just pop into the creation story in random fashion. Something as profound as the miraculous in the creation story is going to be a deliberate intervention from God Himself, and inevitably bound up in a deeper narrative related to how clearly and humbly we perceive Him and discern His will, much like in the case in Mark 8:22-26 with the healing of a blind man at Bethsaida.

 

The Four Types of Relationship Problems

 

Concerning romantic relationships, I would say there are only four types of relationship problems, which I presented as taxonomic categories in my book The Divine Truths of Love. These categories can shift and overlap - they are: 

1)    Minor everyday issues: tiny disputes about domestic preferences, trivial behavioural irritations, things each beloved needs to work on, etc

2)    External life issues: stressors unrelated to the relationship itself (health, work, grief, living in extreme poverty, living in a war zone, etc) that indirectly erode relational satisfaction.

3)    Fundamental incompatibilities: mismatches in religious belief, values, physical attraction, wanting children, life goals, psychological or developmental wounds, etc, that may require dissolution if they can’t be managed or compromised.

4)    Bad beloveds: one or more partner is just not a good/mature/faithful/honest enough person to sustain a good relationship.

From an economic and rational-choice perspective, relationships can be modelled as systems of interdependent utility functions. Category 1 problems (minor everyday issues) represent low-cost inefficiencies that persist due to limited self-awareness or lack of proper attention and responsibility. On their own, these should never be the cause of breaking up. If all your problems are category 1 problems, then with more truthseeking and effort, your relationship is likely to be sustainable and healthy.

Category 2 problems (external life issues) act as negative shocks to the relationship’s system - they depress relational utility without necessarily reflecting intrinsic partner quality or compatibility. Jack and Jill may be compatible as a couple, but a big stress, crisis or trauma unrelated to the relationship itself can cause dissolution. However, many relationships not only survive these but go on to be stronger because of how the beloveds got through the situation together. Couples ill-equipped to deal with category 2 problems will likely find that cumulative transaction costs and emotional debt make optimisation nearly impossible.

Category 3 problems (fundamental incompatibilities) are usually a deal-breaker - and often should be - because they are akin to essential structural mismatches in alignment, where they cannot be mitigated or reconciled. And lastly, category 4 problems (bad beloveds) are usually insurmountable without radical change, because they not only naturally generate lots of category 1 and 3 problems, but bad beloveds constitute agents whose behaviour systematically destroys utility for their partner, necessitating that ‘fail fast’ exit rather than further investment is the dominant and prudent strategy.

I believe that a proper understanding of these categories provides a framework for evaluating relational investment, risk, and potential returns. I also believe that any unmarried, childless couple can work together to assess their relationship in the short-to-medium term, under the above heuristic, and have a judicious stab at whether to invest more in the relationship or dissolve it and (hopefully) part amicably.

The Preposterous Micro-Cult of Richard Carrier

 

Richard Carrier is at it again - this time abusing probability theory to use Aristotle’s existence in order to undermine Jesus’ existence. Carrier has built a small cult-like following on his absurd work centred around the historically ridiculous idea that Jesus never existed. And like all cult figures, he is supported only by the gullible few who cannot discern his squalid tactics and poor reasoning, he calls his critics (which is most people) cranks, insults those who point out his errors, and shores up his narcissistic ego by claiming the experts are deceivers or fools, and that his charlatanism is the right way forward. No, Carrier is a grifter of the worst kind (I’ve tackled him before - see here, here and here).

Yet again he’s written a stinker - an outrageous defence of Jesus’ so-called non-existence by being confused about probability theory, where his entire argument rests on a foundation of methodological errors, circular assumptions, pseudo-statistical theatrics, and an unrecognisable form of historiography. Let me go through his four most fundamental errors:

Error 1
His first amateurish absurdity is his invention of reference classes to predetermine the outcome. He begins by dividing ancient figures into two “reference classes” - mythologised superheroes, who rarely exist historically; and ordinary mundane people, who usually do. He immediately places Jesus in the first class, Aristotle in the second, and then declares - based on his own invented categories - that Jesus must start with a very low prior probability of existence. Even a sketchy understanding of Bayesian probability would show Carrier that this classification is circular - where he’s basically argued: Jesus is mythologised, therefore low prior; mythologised means low prior, therefore Jesus is mythologised. If he had a proper grasp of history, he’d know that historians do not use “mythological superhero” as a category, much less use these invented accounts to lower the prior probability that the underlying person existed. Carrier’s entire Bayesian edifice collapses if his arbitrary priors are replaced by historically grounded ones.

Error 2
Next he arbitrarily imputes likelihood ratios masquerading as mathematics. His article is filled with invented numbers: Aristotle’s writings are “100 times more likely” if he existed, an inscription is “1000 times more likely.”, student testimony is “10 times more likely.”, later historians are “5 times more likely.”, etc just like a cult leader spews out ridiculous claims and expects his acolytes to digest without critical evaluation. None of Carrier’s ratios are derived from data, statistical analysis, or historiographical practice. They are simply numbers Carrier makes up and plugs into equations to produce meaningless results. Carrier loves to sound clever to dupe his pliable readers, then insult or dismiss those outside of the gate as being ‘cranks’ if they see through his nonsense - and he gets very defensive when he fears he’s being exposed. But to see through him is to see quite clearly that his clever-sounding writing is mostly guff – absolute guff. His error 2 violates basic Bayesian methodology for at least three reasons: 1) no empirical calibration of likelihoods; 2) his numbers have no grounding in actual frequencies, error rates, or comparative studies, and 3) the evidence is not independent. Carrier multiplies dependent evidences as if they were independent, deceptively inflating the totals. I don’t know if he understands that small, uncertain datasets cannot sustain precise Bayesian ratios - but if he does, then he’s conning his readers, and if he doesn’t, then he needs to learn by reading more. If he did so, and reasoned honestly and competently, he wouldn’t assign arbitrary values that produce a desired outcome of Jesus’ non-existence, nor does he compare incomparable social strata.

Error 3
Carrier also artificially reduces all early Jesus evidence to zero by redefining everything as dependent, mythical, or derivative, including even some of the most historically testified evidence we have, like that of St. Paul, who is one of the earliest and most independent sources, and wrote within twenty years of Jesus’s death, mentions meeting James the brother of Jesus, refers to Jesus’s execution, and knows of Jesus’s teachings; like that of Josephus, even though the scholarly consensus across atheist, Jewish, and Christian historians holds that the core reference to Jesus is authentic; and like the other gospels, attempting to collapse all of them into a single fictional source, even though they demonstrably have different content, interests, and theology. For more on this type of error, see my blog post The Resurrection and Bayesian Reasoning here.

Error 4
Carrier also misuses Bayesian requirements for independence. He multiplies likelihoods - 100 × 1000 × 10 × 10 × 5 × 2 - as if each piece of Aristotle’s evidence were independent when they are all connected to the same Peripatetic tradition, preserved by the same Hellenistic libraries, and cross-quoted within the same literary networks. Like error 2, this violates the independence requirement of Bayes’ theorem. What makes it more preposterous is how, to suit his own agenda, he does the opposite in treating every Christ tradition as though it is entirely dependent on Mark, even when multiple layers of tradition clearly exist. His Bayesian model is structurally distorted. Carrier claims Christ’s miracle stories lower the prior probability of His existence. But even if you don’t believe in the miracles, the idea that miraculous attribution lowers the probability of the existence of the individual blatantly reverses standard historiographic logic - as anyone who has heard of Alexander, Pythagoras, Augustus or Apollonius would tell you. Moreover, founders of religious movements in antiquity who attract the kind of religious material Jesus attracted almost always did exist - which is another point that reverses Carrier’s logic. The prior probability of Jesus’s existence is high, not low - and Carrier’s model was rigged from the start in order for him to attempt to woo his followers into submission to his mistaken logic.

No, the truth is, Carrier is an amateur grifter posing as a confident, smart authority figure - and only the kind of people who typically latch on to charlatans like him are those likely not to see through him. In fact, once you condition on ‘already impressed by Carrier,’ the posterior for ‘sees through the act’ drops to about the same level as a p-value in bad psychology research, heh heh. 😊

When Carrier assigns probabilities, his prior is usually whatever number first wandered into his Bayesian dreamscape. His result in this article is both mathematically and historically meaningless. And this, I’m afraid, is what all charlatans, cranks and cult gurus do - they draw vulnerable, easily-swayed people in by constructing a distorted narrative to output the answer they already believe, and wish to convince cult shoppers to purchase what he’s selling (yes, he continually calls for financial donations too).

Betraying The Rules Of Truth & Reason

 

Many dodgy belief systems are based on accepting propositions that are so obviously not true or factual, it really is remarkable to me how and why people assent to such beliefs. What I find most remarkable (and disturbing) is how so many people who believe these things appear to have zero chance of budging from their folly, or exhibiting even a flicker of curiosity towards the opposing (and truthful) propositions. It's one of the strangest things about human beings, but many have become inured to it by its ability to become so commonplace.

The main reason it's so utterly strange is because it wantonly betrays what I call the rules of truth and reason - the rules that most humans ordinarily act as though they value most of the time. You have to think of the rules of truth and reason as being a bit like a language game to which we all know the rules. The reason the world of beliefs has become so muddied is quite a bit to do with the fact that most humans are not willing to pay the full costs of truthseeking, but perhaps even more to do with the fact that language has been so readily transposed and distorted. 

Think of the rules of truth and reason as being a bit like a game of snooker. The rules of snooker include procedures about how and when you should take your shots - like potting a red and then a colour, like how each colour is worth a different number of points, like how only one player can be playing at the table on any given shot, and so forth. If you depart from these rules, then you are no longer playing snooker. If you play by those rules, but cheat when your opponent isn't looking, you are no longer playing a fair game.

The same applies to the rules of truth and reason - they are fairly well fixed in a way that makes language meaningful, in a way that makes arguments logical, and in a way that makes the rational and the empirical essential tools for discovery - but they are only the explicit ones. There are implicit rules that are more like obligations - like the obligation to be open to learning from more informed sources, like the obligation to consent to rational persuasion, like the obligation to change your mind when the counter-arguments are compelling, and like the obligation to embrace facts and truths over convenient and expedient falsehoods. These are duties and responsibilities that have been widely compromised by the many who attempt to create the illusion that they are playing by the same language game, but are really not.

The Most Shocking Changes Your Old Self Wouldn't Have Believed

 

Imagine if you were a child of the 1970s or 80s in Britain, and you went into a coma, and then awoke in 2025. I’m sure lots would startle you about how things have changed, especially technologically. But I doubt there’d be much that would shock you more than the following four things: 

1)     The absurd phenomenon of men competing in women’s sports, using women’s toilets, and being incarcerated in women’s prisons, where a significant proportion of the nation’s population is actively encouraging it, and witch hunting those who actually stand up for real women’s rights and oppose it. 😠

2)     That so many people have become so insane and hysterical about climate change and alarmist environmentalism, and can’t see through the scam artists at the top who are pushing this for their own ideological and financial agenda. 😠

3)     The severe undermining of robust debate and free speech in mainstream institutions, but especially in universities. Universities, once bastions of learning, free enquiry and spirited debate, are now havens of woke, supine, censorious cancel culture, almost unrecognisable from the institutions of academic excellence that once defined them.  😠

4)     Or on a lighter note, that the writer of the blog you're currently reading has been churning out posts of such scintillating quality, unflagging wit and unbroken consistency for so many years - and yet still walks among the unfamous, with no viral YouTube channel to his name. 😀

Calling In The Armey

 

I often lament how large the state has become in the UK, in terms of public services sub-optimally performing because they have become too bloated (as per Gammon’s Law, diseconomies of scale, etc). But in my book Benevolent Libertarianism, I also devote some time to considering the trade-off between money put into public services and money spent in private enterprise. I explore the matter of a healthy ratio of public and private spending in GDP, and ask if most of the spending was on private goods and services and we just had a small state - only functional for defence, law, health, social services, police, welfare, roads, and a few other light regulatory things - would all the money spent in the private sector be money well spent, or would it just mean we buy lots more consumerist stuff we don’t really need?

Last time I looked, total UK government spending was about 45% of GDP, which is large. If you tend to dip into economics, you’ve probably heard of the Armey Curve - an inverted U-shaped relationship where, as the public share of GDP rises from a tiny level, the economy often benefits (via public goods, infrastructure, human capital, etc), but beyond some threshold additional public spending tends to deliver diminishing or negative returns to growth. There has been much debate over the decades about the optimal percentage, but there’s a general consensus that 45% is way too high - although the optimal figure is also contingent on exactly what the money is being spent on. If the UK government was spending 45% of GDP primarily on defence, law, health, social services, police, welfare, roads and a few other light regulatory things, and all those sectors were thriving, it would be a different proposition to the one we are currently faced with; a bloated state that’s out of control with its spending, and the sectors performing poorly (in some cases dreadfully).

A smaller state would shift spending towards greater private consumption and private provision of things the state used to supply, but in many cases with better value for money. But it isn’t self-evident what the optimal trade-off is, because it’s a hugely complex, variable and intractable set of considerations. When private spending is allocative and productive, it increases productive capacity and long-run welfare. But when it’s consumerism with low social return, like unnecessary marketing-driven upgrades, or over-consumption of low-value goods we don’t really need, then shifting public money to private consumption can reduce social welfare if it replaces productive public services.

The big challenge is twofold. Firstly, no single “optimal” ratio exists, because range and composition matter more. And secondly, if we shrink the state to a “minimal” model, private substitutes will emerge - but unless private markets and institutions can fully and equitably fill the gaps, there will be a different kind of deterioration in social cohesion.

I have a chapter in Benevolent Libertarianism devoted to striking this balance. But, alas, there is very little appetite in most developed countries to even acknowledge this problem, let alone attempt to solve it. The Armey Curve should serve as a continual reminder that public spending has a positive impact on the economy up to a certain optimal threshold, after which it has a detrimental, negative effect. But politically, it’s far easier to expand spending than to rein it in, because often the benefits are visible and immediate while the costs are diffuse and long-term - and the general public is frequently seduced by low-hanging fruit and offers of so-called ‘free lunches’.