Power Law Inequalities & Geniuses

In response to my recent Blog post on inequality, a friend brought up power laws and asked about their relationship with inequality. This is very apt at a time when we've just been subjected to a sub-standard piece of propaganda from the BBC called The Super Rich & Us - a recent programme presented by someone who doesn't understand much about economics, interviewing other people (some of whom were economists) who also don't understand much about economics. With a better understanding of the subject, they wouldn't have spent the best part of two hours utterly confused about most of the matters regarding inequality, power laws, living standards, supply and demand and consumption.

The relationship between power laws and inequality is largely built on society's revealed preferences, but there's a little more to it than that. Power laws do lead to concentrations of wealth falling in a small proportion of the population's hands. But they are nothing much to worry about: they are to be expected because in a free market where goods and services are freely exchanged for money, the rate of consumption always exceeds the rate of service for an individual.

In other words, there are more ways for Jack to procure goods and services from other providers than there are ways for Jack to provide goods and services to others. Whether you're a lawyer, a taxi driver or a circus clown, you earn money providing a particular skill to your customers.

But the money you spend (at Tesco, on Amazon, at the hairdresser’s, at the garage, etc) goes in multiple directions. Lots of people want food, books, a haircut, fuel, etc, so concentrations of wealth fall in the hands of large-scale providers, who are a small proportion of society, relative to the number of consumers.

(By the way, point of technicality, even consumers are providers in that their consumption provides producer surplus for other providers, but that’s not central to the point being made).

So you can hopefully see why power laws exist, and also how wealth can be concentrated in a few hands very quickly. To give you a much simpler illustration than something as complex as UK society; suppose 20 people are put on an otherwise uninhabited island with treacherous weather conditions. They have to stay on the island for one year, and each inhabitant is given 15 tokens a day with which to buy food from a delivery helicopter that lands every day at noon. What they don’t spend on food, they keep, and at the end of the year whatever tokens they have saved can be exchanged for £3 per token.

During their stay it emerges that there is an expert in building safe, warm tent sheltering from the natural plants. For a fee of 350 tokens per person, payable over the next 50 weeks, all 19 of the other inhabitants can have a tent built for them, thereby enjoying warm, dry and safe nights of sleep for their island duration. At the end of the year our tent building expert will have seen a significant concentration of wealth in his hands, at the expense of the other 19 islanders, but they will have enjoyed a year’s worth of tent-related benefits.

That’s a very simple illustration of a much wider phenomenon that is going on across society, where innovators, writers, musicians and hugely successful business owners are the beneficiaries of these power law transfers. Nobody would have any difficulty seeing a just power law inequality in my island scenario - but yet when the situations apply to real business goings on in society, preferences, they don't seem to get it. To the extent that most inequality is the result of an aggregation of society's revealed preferences - inequality is one of the most democratic of all human phenomena.  

But if you take society as a collection of individuals, you’ll find another important trend that plays out in power laws: there should be a continual natural trend towards progression and improvement. Here's what I mean.

Humans are generally working (either together cooperatively or independently) to make their own lives better, and despite exceptions, this engenders an inclination towards making the world a better place, whether it’s through all the benefits of trade, innovations with which we are continually seeking to improve products, technology and new designs, or lest we forget, the numerous formal institutions that (with mixed results, but generally more pros than cons) make laws and implement regulations that are thought to make society a better place to live.

Because the nature of trade and work constantly involves tweaks, improvements and innovations here and there, and further multiplied both across society and in a fairly linear fashion across time, we have a situation where (despite obvious peaks and troughs and chaotic anomalies and degrees of randomness in the system – world wars, financial crashes, tsunamis, etc) there is a fairly inevitable (or at least high probability) and stable trend of human progression built into the system.

And it's this trend that's another catalyst for generating inequality - the fact that nature is not very democratic (looks, size, shape, talents, intelligence, sensory apparatus, opportunity and background), and therefore it is expected that there won't be equal outcomes. There is a notable difference in all of these human qualities in each of us, as their attainment depends on undemocratic things like fortune and pursuit, as well as hard work, skill and application.

Consequently, then, inequality has a lot do with the fact that humans are tenaciously trying to improve themselves, and the fact that progression is in our blood - it is not just an inevitable part of our journey, it is an exhibition of how influential and advancing our species can be - particularly when you factor that into this observation about human beings.

The Pros & Cons Of Driverless Cars

Totally coincidentally to this week's news, I stumbled on a page that said the following:

"The Texas Transportation Institute estimates that in 2000, the 75 largest metropolitan areas experienced 3.6 billion vehicle hours of delay, resulting in 5.7 billion gallons in wasted fuel and $67.5 billion in lost productivity."

A quick calculation suggests that that's about 0.7% of America's GDP. What struck me most about reading that was a somewhat unrelated thought that has become more topical this week - that one thing those statistics show is just how tremendously beneficial driverless cars are going to be to humans and to the environment, as many of the costs in time and pollution will be eradicated. No doubt this will be expedited by the government's latest desire to ban the sale of diesel and petrol cars by 2040.

What will driverless cars be like?
It seems fairly certain that future cars will have computers that can drive more safely resourcefully and efficiently than we can, with far fewer queues and a reduction in hold ups. Drink-driving won't be an issue, nor will tiredness at the wheel. Gone will be the car insurance industry, and the driving school industry, and there'll probably be no need for car ownership either, as technology devices and advanced algorithms will probably be able to satisfy any customer's need for a ride to any destination any time they need one. 

Journey times will be shorter, as self-driving cars will be able to whizz around within inches of each other under precise computational commands, thereby removing the need for traffic lights, roundabouts or stopping at junctions. Bear in mind, though, those gains in journey times will need to be offset against increased road usage, because when self-driving cars offer more benefits than trains, I'd excect there to be more road users making more journeys in driverless cars.

But there is something else to consider here. For many, car ownership is something of a status symbol, and for many others there is genuine enjoyment in driving, particularly if you have a fast car. It's possible that those could be the two things that delay the transition from all human-driving cars to all computer-driving cars. Status-mongering in the driverless car industry will largely be confined to what kind of car you can afford to hire - which may not be much of a status symbol anyway if taxis are anything to go by.

Other than that, when it does eventually happen in a widespread fashion, the gains are going to be immense - and the next generation born thereafter, and all subsequent generations thereafter still, are never going to know what it was like for us to live in a society in which we got to drive ourselves, went fast if we wanted to, and had to do things like purchase car insurance, queue in traffic jams and look for parking spaces.

When Will The Pope Stop Being A Crazy Cat Over Capitalism?

Pope Francis had harsh words for libertarians at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences on Friday. He pontificated about the ills of 'radical selfishness'; said that the libertarian individual is 'anti-social' and that he 'denies the value of the common good'.

If I were a Catholic, I'd be thoroughly embarrassed that the head of my church was so abjectly uninformed about such a big subject. I know Catholics believe in miracles - well here's one right in front of them, because it's fairly miraculous that one individual could cram so much nonsense into one short speech.

On the charge of 'radical selfishness' - it's true that a free market is about individuals pursuing their own goals - but as Adam Smith reminds us, this acts as a social mechanism that channels collective objectives toward meeting the needs of the people that make up that society, by ensuring competition between buyers and suppliers, which channels the profit motive of individuals into providing products that society desires at prices they are willing to pay.

In other words, a society of individuals pursuing their own good leads to an increase in the common good, not a decrease, because trade improves the lives of all who partake in it. And far from making us anti-social, it encourages social co-operation as providers must seek the needs and wants of society in order to provide what they require. Pope Francis's attack on libertarianism is a straw man attack, completely misunderstanding the thing he condemns.

 

Moreover, the Pope's anti-capitalist narrative is contradictory. Suppose I wanted to see a physically healthier Britain but I also wanted to quell the evils of physical exercise, you'd probably think me quite a strange and misguided fellow. My mistake would be a silly one to make, but it's not all too dissimilar to the mistake the Pope makes when he talks about how we need to temper the woeful profit motive of capitalism if we are to bring an end to poverty.

The free market is literally the aggregation of the billions of mutually beneficial exchanges between willing suppliers and consumers every day all over the world. Profit is made when value is created, and value is only created when people supply things that consumers need or want, whether it's food, clothes, electricity, computers, holidays, new technology, fresh knowledge or better medicines.

I'm all for encouraging people to be motivated by love, kindness, generosity and philanthropy, but being down on the profit motive is, in most cases, to be guilty of picking the wrong battle based on an erroneous interpretation of the so-called enemy.

If the Pope is concerned about helping eradicate poverty, as he is perfectly right to be, he would do much better if preached the kind of message conveyed here, here, here, here, and here.

If There's One Must-Read Book Of The Past Few Years, I Think It Is This One....

In my opinion, one of the most important books in recent years is Matt Ridley’s Evolution of Everything - it's one of the few books in the modern era that I think can justifiably be called a must-read book.

After his excellent works The Red Queen and The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley’s Evolution of Everything makes the case that bottom-up evolution rather than top-down design is the main driving force that has shaped much of culture, technology and society, and is shaping our future.

He argues, quite rightly that change in technology, language, morality and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual and spontaneous, and that much of the human world is the result of local human action, not of centrally planned human design; it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the top down organisations of a few.

I should say, though, that while it's true he covers a wide range of topics, and gets most things right - from the internet to bankers, from crop circles to education, from the nurture vs. nature debate to technology, from mind to money, from genes to morality, and many more topics - the book is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

Some of the arguments involve selectively loose cherry-picking which is offered up to conveniently support some of his contentions at the omission of perfectly good contra-examples. And in a couple of the chapters, the one on religion being the best example, he builds too many presumptions on top of the central thesis of the book.

The other thing worth saying is that although the book is a very good compilation of how relevant the bottom-up understanding of society is to the reader, it's not as though this is the first time it has been argued. In fact, the book itself is based on the prescient wisdom of Lucretius in his masterpiece De Rerum Natura - (a work I've read multiple times, and one that seems more impressive each time I read it).

Evolution of Everything is also underwritten by decades of formal contributions to economics from the likes of Bastiat, Smith, Ricardo, Coase, Marshall, Hayek, Schumpeter, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Sowell, Friedman, McCloskey and Boudreaux, about how markets and society evolve primarily through local transactions, not command economies from on high.

It's a must-read for precisely the reason the critics hate it - because it involves a revolutionary (if long-standing) message that the majority of people haven't intellectually assimilated or emotionally accepted. That when left to act freely in accordance with our local initiatives, we frequently bring about societal progressions, economic growth, increased prosperity, reductions in global poverty, and an enhanced well-being and standard of living that puts to shame the self-serving and misjudged attempts to engender this from on high.

It's a message I, and many like me, have been trying to get across for years - one that is anathema to the politicians, ideologues, demagogues, self-appointed authority figures, socialists, environmentalists, cult leaders, and eco-warriors alike - that evolution is a phenomenon that extends far beyond the natural selection of biology. And that things that are widely believed to be the sovereign brainwork of the controlling few, such as morality, the economy, technology, science education, government, money and all manner of cultural norms - are actually, in Ridley's words, "phenomena of evolutionary emergence — of complexity and order spontaneously created in a decentralised fashion without a designer."

Bottom up, not top down

Central to the message is not just that bottom-up evolutionary emergence usually does a better job of organising and innovating that top-down control freakery; it's that the myth that nothing would ever get done without human direction from on high is a continually stultifying, misleading and damaging myth  - not just because of the deadweight costs and inefficiencies it imposes on societies, but because it persists with the precarious cult of personality and perpetuates Thomas Carlyle's anachronistic Great Man theory.

It is all too easy to tendentiously ascribe great theories, ideas and discoveries to great figures in history. As we know, Newton is most closely associated with the incipient knowledge of gravity, Maxwell with electromagnetism, Smith with free markets, Darwin with natural selection, Mendel with genetics, Einstein with relativity, Watson and Crick with the double helix of DNA, and so on. But those theories, ideas and discoveries didn't occur in a vacuum, they were a large group effort, and if it had not been them it wouldn't have been long before other names would have been the associative names.  

Perhaps the best living example of the phenomenon of the evolutionary emergence of a thing of complexity and order spontaneously created in a decentralised fashion without a designer is the means by which you're reading this - the Internet. Nobody sat down one day and planned the Internet as a fait accompli phenomenon - it is a global system of interconnected computer networks that evolved over time, and is still evolving, in a cumulative step by step process of trial and error that tailors to our tastes and needs.

The emergence of the Internet - like cities, cars, houses, clothes, supermarkets, science and medicine - was driven by consumer demand, be it for global communication, widespread knowledge, online shopping, social networking and the countless other benefits it brings to human beings all across the world. It provides a microcosmic example of markets in general - where the complex emergence of order occurs not from being designed top down, but by a long natural selection-type process of good and useful ideas surviving, and bad ones being weeded out.

The same is true in pretty much all walks of life. Leading figures in history don't really proscribe morality, Chancellors don't really run economies, Prime Ministers don't really run countries, and singers don't really catalyse brand new genres. Of course, individuals can be influential and help the world along, but one of the most perpetuated fallacies throughout history, and still alive and kicking in the present, is that these things are planned and designed rather than evolved on a trial and error basis.

The rational calculations of trial and error are the driving force behind our progression, not top-down prescriptions. The theologian that tells you how to be a good person, and the moral philosopher who enunciates the rules for being an ethical citizen are basing their precepts on what humans have already worked out over lengthy execution time through the evolutionary basis of trial and error.

Attitudes to sex are an interesting example of how evolution of thought changes thinking. Once upon a time homosexual practices were utterly frowned upon by large swathes of society, and punishable by law. At the same time attitudes to under age sex and abuse were relatively relaxed. Fast forward a few decades, and now (thankfully) the opposite has occurred in both cases - society is much less tolerant of under age sex and abuse, and homosexuals can live freely and openly in a more tolerant society.

This example, and many others like it, demonstrates how much our morality is an evolved, learned phenomenon. It's also a fact that the more economically developed and prosperous nations have become, the better their citizens have behaved. Similarly, the more state-oppression, dictatorship, and lack of basic rights seen in history, the worse they've behaved.

The main cause of why people are still stuck in poverty is the unaccountable power of corrupt self-serving politicians against citizens that lack the basics required to be a successful trading nation with access to the global free market economy. Corrupt officials and poverty-stricken citizens are sprung from the same root. This was true for most people for most of human history - now it's still only true for a proportion of people alive today, but still true nonetheless. 

The places where people struggle most are the places where politicians live parasitically off the fruits of the citizens' labour. While once it was primarily for luxury and war, now it is for control and indulgence off the backs of people who've not yet won the battle over the state for free trade, private property rights, stable rule of law, limited political interference, lower taxes and personal liberty.

Darwinian efficiency

What's most vital in all this is that the Darwinian model of natural selection is by far a more efficient and powerful driving force for improvement, prosperity and advancement than any top-down designer, precisely because it is the accumulation of individual efforts into one grand collective effort that sows the seeds (as Leonard Read's tremendous essay I Pencil shows better than anywhere else I've seen - all of our technology and material accomplishments are made by a cooperative endeavours, not by the few people associated with such gadgets).

The energy revolutions that have helped reduce our human effort and replaced it with the harnessing of animals and machines have mirrored nature's law of least effort in providing a correlation between energy expended and progress rapidity. A train being able to get us from A to B quicker than on foot, or a machine that can pack meat into tins quicker than the human hands, are the kinds of progress that when aggregated lead to, on average, a person in country A that consumes 7 times the energy of a person in country B, and one who is likely to be about 7 times richer too.

There is also an interesting observation by Edward Glaeser about the near perfect correlation between urbanisation and a nation's prosperity - that is, the countries where the majority live in cites are wealthier (about four times wealthier) than countries where the majority live in rural districts. Further, the faster the city grows in size, the more efficient it grows per head, largely due to the benefits of recombination of ideas in densely populated areas.

A term called Schumpeter's gale (coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter) is a term that observes that market progress is built on both failures and successes - what he called a 'perennial gale of creative destruction'. In other words, for the economy to progress with strong businesses that have the innovative impetus to survive, it must also contain less-strong businesses whose lack of success makes them fragile to the point of discontinuing. Schumpeter, in using a Darwinian analogue, called this 'industrial mutation'. And as another fine economist, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), was shrewd enough to point out in the 1940s:

"The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction. They bother neither about the vested interests of capitalists nor about the fate of the workers who lose their jobs if as consumers they no longer buy what they used to buy."

Émile Chartier had a lovely way of analogising this:

"Every boat is copied from another boat. Let’s reason as follows in the manner of Darwin. It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages, and thus never be copied. One could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others."

The upshot is, the free market is the place where free citizens drive the outcomes - we are the bosses, which is why the things the agents in question govern have the highest probability of being the most efficient. As Matt Ridley reminds readers in the book:

"It is axiomatic among right-thinking people that there are many things the market cannot provide, and therefore the state must.  The sheer magical thinking inherent in this thought is rarely examined.  Because the market cannot do something, why must we assume that the state knows better how to do it? Take six basic needs of a human being:  food, clothing, health, education, shelter and transportation.  Roughly speaking, in most countries the market provides food and clothing, the state provides healthcare and education, while shelter and transportation are provided by a mixture of the tow - private firms with semi-monopolistic privileges supplied by government:  crony capitalism, in a phrase. Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards?"

Here's something I find quite intriguing about human progression

This section is probably interesting enough to justify its own separate blog post - but anyway, you may have noticed that more than ever before the world's two dozen most advanced economies are knowledge-based economies - service and technology based expertise are at the forefront of their growth, not the sweat and toil of manufacturing goods, and obviously not agrarian labour.

There is a good reason for this - we progressed from agrarian to manufacturing to knowledge-based economies, as did a handful of other countries that did so at roughly the same pace. All the other advanced economies did so, or are doing so at a slightly slower pace, and there is good reason why.

Not all countries will progress at the same rate - there will always be countries that get their foot in the door first, and are then followed by others. But what underpins this truth is something even more fundamental and revealing - it is probably impossible to jump the natural threefold order of progression: that is, it is probable that every country on the road, from majority poverty to majority well off, has to go through the threefold process of being agrarian, then manufacturing, then knowledge economies.

We see a lot of frustration that some countries are developing more slowly than others, but given that we established that no authority figures control economies, they occur bottom-up and are driven by the people, it could be that every country that is going to progress or advance has to go through the quite hard and labour-rich process of being a manufacturing country first before it becomes as prosperous as the world's leading economies (and even then, things like geography, climate and political situations in neighbouring probably will continue to have a bearing).

I suppose the logic is obvious really - it's difficult to become a financial service economy until you have gradually harnessed the infrastructure through the manufacturing process. National and international progress, again like biological evolution, occurs in small incremental steps, not giant leaps (the only caveat to this is that now so many countries are advanced, and now everyone is globally connected, it's quite likely that the developing nations will have a leg-up in their own version of the progression explosions we enjoyed when no one else was prosperous 200 years ago).

The other remarkable thing, as Matt Ridley points out in the book, is that inventions pretty much always come along at the right time - there are rarely products or services that come along years too early or years too late. Think about it; when have you ever known a good to be invented and sit idly for a lengthy period of time until we developed the technological wherewithal to utilise on it? Equally, when have you ever identified a desperate societal need for something and found we had to wait a lengthy period of time for it to be introduced? The answer is pretty much never.

And the reason is fairy obvious - technological emergence is concomitant with the whole nexus of other emergences - they interrelate, and they emerge in the period of time when they would be most use for a particular industry. Required innovations find their innovators rather than the other way round. Gloves find hands and glasses find eyes, not vice versa.

Patterned evolution

As we now know from reading works like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, the body of an organism is a mere vehicle for the genes to propagate themselves. It is the selfishness of the gene that is the primary driving force for the survival of the organism (same with markets) - it is these acting in accordance with local effects that goes on to produce the splendour we see in the biological diversity of plants, fungi and animals.

Any system where information is transmitted, provided there is reproduction fidelity and random elements, should mirror the evolutionary process we see in biological kingdoms, including ideas and the sharing of knowledge. It's a sobering thought, but had the materialist philosophies of Democritus, Epicures and Lucretius - particularly the idea that nature is made up of constituent parts - not been both suppressed and surpassed by competing monotheistic theologies of the era, we probably would have known about many of the post-1550 scientific discoveries long before we did.

Final word

To finish, we said earlier that the Internet is perhaps one of the best analogies of microcosmic free market in action - it has evolved into a wonderful nexus of human activity, all unplanned, all emerging from local incentives and bottom up ideas. On top of that, it should also be noted that if you transported an arcadian farmer from his habitat to the present day and showed him the Internet he would think it too sophisticated and complex to have emerged evolutionarily, and far too wonderfully ordered to be the result of local evolutionary emergence.

Yet if you apply Leonard Read's I Pencil model to something as complex as the Internet you'll find it takes something as prodigious as the collectivised human species to design something like it. Further, just imagine how much we'll take our sophisticated emergence in the years ahead - imagine the future digital democracy (as some have called it), is ability to share more and more ideas, and make people accountable like never before - what people from Lucretius to Ridley have posited is just the beginning.

Think back to a few hundred thousand years ago, and consider those primeval grunts from our ancestors as they began to make sense of their surroundings. They never could have imagined that those inceptive primate sounds would one day evolve into the entire world of languages, literature, poetry, philosophy, science and technology that we have today. And just as Lord Of The Rings, the Manhattan skyline, space travel and the Hadron Collider would have been far beyond the imaginative precipitations of our primeval ancestors, so too is much of humanity's future evolution beyond us today.

We are picking up pace in this modern age as we reach new heights and new depths in shorter passages of time - and the driving force behind this is bottom up, local ideas, as people gradually wean themselves off the old top-down ways of thinking. I think that is the essential realisation that the greatest number of people need the most, and Matt Ridley's book Evolution of Everything is a good place to start.  

 

 

Is This Going To Turn Out To Be One Of Humanity's Costliest Mistakes?

After yesterday's blog on the issue of state-subsidised green expenditure, a friend commented that he thought the end result will still be a benefit for society as a whole - if you like, the State doing something on our behalf that we wouldn’t volitionally choose, but that's beneficial for us in the long term.

There are several issues with this line of thinking - the first being that there are opportunity costs that don't get factored in to the equation (which we've covered before on this blog), and the second is that it is hard to justify much of the State-mandated expenditure that weaves and entangles itself into the fabric of society's revealed preferences.

This is particularly pertinent, given that there is going to be a diminishing marginal rate of substitution, and that if you want to play the long game (quite rightly, usually) you have to also factor in the trade off between capabilities now and future capabilities, which probably amounts to a transfer of resources from less well off to more well off people, not just in terms of money, but in terms of living standards, greener technology and the concomitant environmental improvements.

As various examples of countries becoming more prosperous show, when there is industrial progression there begins an increase in pollution and environmental degradation until after a point it levels out, and then subsequently increased ability to be more environmentally mindful plays out. This is called the environmental Kuznets curve.

To put it another way, when countries become more prosperous they pollute more, but then increased scientific and technological potential enables them to cut down on their environmental externalities. Take Bob. Bob lives in London in the early part of the 19th century, and grows up as the industrial revolution is taking shape. He sees an industry dominated by coal, oil and gas, and a capital city full of smog and dirt.

If you put Bob in a time machine and showed him modern day London he'd be astounded at how comparably clean and unpolluted it is, and the ease with which he can breathe in air and drink clean water. Once he's got over that surprise, he'd be stunned that there weren't dozens of people dying of diseases on every street corner.

As well as markets making us greener anyway (as I explain in this blog post), when you look at relatively smog-free places like London, New York, Seoul, Berlin, Madrid, Rome and Paris, and compare them to comparably worse cities in places like China and India, there is no reason not to believe that the richer countries' major cities are simply on are on a more environmentally friendly side of the Kuznets curve at present, and that the poorer major countries are not there yet (point of note: despite huge growth, overall China and India are still poor countries).

Moreover, you only need to look into the world of nanotechnology and shape-shifting and see what scientists are already on the verge of doing to realise just how lacking in forward thinking this whole Green movement actually is. The solar revolution will transform our energy usage in ways that will make gas and oil all-but redundant, and through the ability to genetically modify plants and trees in astonishing execution times, trees will be able to mature on previously infertile land in a matter of a few years.

Lab-grown meats and vegetables will revolutionise the food industry as we wean ourselves off much of our factory farming, and the machine industry will be revolutionised as we wean ourselves off fossil fuel dependency. All the domestic issues that preoccupy the greens are on their way to being things of the past thanks to science and technology.

Another kind of grandfather paradox

You know those people who bemoan our selfish consumption of natural resources now instead of preserving it for our grandchildren a couple of generations down the line. I wonder if they've ever stopped to consider what should be a very obvious flaw in their assumption - that such an argument can, of course, apply to those grandchildren as well. If they consume those natural resources won't they be selfishly failing to preserve it for their grandchildren? And if they consume it won't those grandchildren be failing to preserve it for their own grandchildren a couple of further generations down the line?

It's obvious that this question can go on ad infinitum, because when it comes to any of the world's limited resources, every bit of consumption at any point in time is consumption that someone born either in the wrong place or the wrong time cannot have. If preservation and sustainability were the only goals then this would lead to the absurd conclusion that no one should be consuming any present day resources because they would always be robbing somebody else of it.

Even if we ignore the fact that future generations will be richer and more prosperous than us (a fact we shouldn't actually ignore because it is one of the most important considerations in discussions like this) most resources of value are best consumed at a time which maximises the optimal market value of those resources. Consuming coal, paper or oil at a time when those resources are most beneficial to humans is obviously far wiser than consuming them at a time when they are no longer of much use to us.

And what about pollution?

Pollution is one of those things that always appears in green articles as being bad. It should be obvious that this kind of narrative is both presumptuous and silly. Take a factory that emits sulfer oxides in the air. Obviously sulfe oxide emissions affect the pollution levels, but that's not the same as saying that they are bad. Technically breathing pollutes the environment, but no one sensible suggests we should stop breathing.

If a factory is turning a profit, it is creating value in society (because consumers prefer spending on the products to keeping their money), so the right question to ask is whether the pollution the factory emits has costs that outweigh the benefits of the consumer surplus the factory affords to society in total production (not to mention the jobs it creates too) or whether the benefits of the factory outweigh the cost of the pollution.

How can we tell which it is? Well, if the negative spillover effects of the pollution are less than the cost of preventing it, the pollution produces more gains than losses. If the negative spillover effects of the pollution are more than the cost of preventing it, the pollution should be dealt with. The point is, sometimes pollution confers net gains on society - actually, my instinct is it usually does. So not only is it the case that a 'pollution is always bad and needs eradicating' narrative is presumptuous and silly, I'm afraid there are many people who don't even think to consider to ask about costs and benefits at all.

It's one level of foolishness to get the cost-benefit analysis wrong and come out on the side of discontinuing some pollution that is conferring net benefits on society. It's quite another to not even acknowledge the need for a cost-benefit analysis at all. What's worrying is that such people, the Greens and people voting for them, make up a fairly significant proportion of our young students, if the voting polls are anything to go by.

The final big issue

The most serious difficulty with the green phenomena though is that for the most part it is going to be looked upon by future generations as being an intellectual solecism of short-sightedness on our human journey, because all the energy, time, and financial resources that went in to it will go on to have been largely unnecessary alongside the much more efficient and empirically relevant scientific progression humans are making and will continue to make.

At the end of the day it is going to be something else that sees us through the climate change issues, and it's not the ever-expanding business that's largely dependent on junk economics, government levies and crony capitalist special interest groups that are going to provide the antidotes.

Lest we forget as well that the numbers are not exactly chicken feed: the climate change industry is apparently worth over $1.5 trillion. That's $4 billion a day spent on things like carbon trading, carbon consulting, carbon sequestration, biofuels and wind turbines on a problem that's going to turn out to have been hardly a problem at all.

It's an industry about the same size as the world's entire online shopping industry, but the big difference between the online shopping industry and the climate change industry is that in the case of the former the money you spend is on precisely the goods and services you want - whereas in the case of the latter you get involuntary expenses priced into your Pigouvian taxes, your energy and fuel bills, the government subsidies and the department expenditure in the shape of environment, minerals and waste teams present in every local council.

On top of that you get a multitude of recycling bins, environmentalist consultation, PR companies, and all the pseudo-philosophical outpourings from the likes of George Monbiot, Naomi Klein, Elizabeth Kolbert, Al Gore, Noam Chomsky and Al Franken who gather in their trail an army of activist acolytes burning banknotes outside HSBC and erecting their tents outside St Paul's cathedral, with thousands of others now joining them in spreading falsehoods like "capitalism is ruining the planet" and "we are all doomed if we don't stop it".

Although the climate change agenda is not without traces of good - when taken as a whole it is almost certainly going to end up being one of the costliest mistakes human beings ever became embroiled in.

None of the great human qualities and ideas - language, art, literature, morality, religion, philosophy - explain the progression-explosion from successful survival machines to thriving humans with the advancements of today. What caused the upward surge at the end of the hockey stick was the increased ability to trade, to mass populate, all of which underpinned by our ability to mass communicate - to share ideas, knowledge and innovations in trial and error fashion. It was the evolutionary equivalent of the recombination of genes that occurs in sex, where natural selection favours survivability.

It seems a nigh-on certainty to me that solar energy is the future. In recent years the price of solar power has dropped significantly, as the cost of manufacturing, the cost of installation and the electricity prices derived from it have become cheaper. The solar costs for consumers will soon be more affordable than costs derived from fossil fuels.

Not only is solar going to be the most prominent of all our energy sources - but given that the sun has enough provision to drive our Solar System for another 5 billion years, I can conceive of a time when the vast majority of our energy resources will be derived from photovoltaic cells converted into electricity. By far the country with the most prodigiously profitable solar industry is going to be China, probably followed by Japan and the United States, plus as the technology becomes more sophisticated and marketable it will spread more prominently throughout the globe

Just about any problem the world faces - climate change, war, illness, famine, terrorism, poverty, dictatorship, maybe even most crime and political malfeasance - can be eliminated or diminished by the continual trial and error of idea-sharing.

Is This The Most Confused Blogger Around?

It was the name of the blog that first grabbed my attention on a page full of links - it leapt out at me: "Capitalism Creates Poverty" - and I thought, wow, I have to take a look, because no one actually believes that capitalism created poverty, do they? Sure I know many proclaim it, but when pressing them I've never known anyone to really actually definitely believe it.

But having perused one or two of his posts, I can see this guy really does believe it - so much so that his whole raison d'etre appears to be based on the notion that capitalism is this evil, dangerous driver of people's plight.

Alas, all the time this guy's base fallacy endures, he's always going to be peddling the wrong propaganda. What he needs to learn is that capitalism, or the market as we'll call it, is not an overarching sentience, it is an amoral descriptive term that simply describes the aggregation of everybody's wants and needs. The only concern of the market is what humans value, which is discovered by what they demand, who can supply it, and at what price.

If we demand recycled metal, the market will see to it that someone provides it; if we demand machines to draw out cash from our bank accounts, someone will provide it. The free market doesn't do anything to people, it simply provides what people demand.

It is, therefore literally impossible for the free market to make people poor, or cause poverty, as many confused people claim. It is the places in which the free market hasn't yet taken effect that poverty arises - it is the lack of the free market that causes poverty, just as it is the lack of food that causes hunger.

Someone else growing their own food is not the cause of a starving person's hunger in the next village, because that person was hungry beforehand. Of course, a person who shares the food they've grown, or better, teaches his neighbour how to grow his own food has helped alleviate his neighbour's hunger, but he has not caused the hunger, because they were both hungry before they learned to grow food.

The World Bank defines absolute poverty as anyone in the world who lives on less than $1.90 a day. It's true that most people live on more than that, and that unfortunately there are still too many people that currently still haven't escaped absolute poverty, but what you have to remember is that poverty is the natural state of human beings for pretty much all of the past 200,000 years of our existence.

The primary difference between someone in poverty and someone well off is a matter of productivity. It is not a matter of one getting a huge slice of pie and the other getting a tiny proportion, it is that there are two pies and they are different sizes. The free market helps the guy with the smaller pie by enabling him to be more productive, but it requires some co-operation with people that have bigger pies.

Try asking the question in the opposite way

We are constantly hearing columnists and social commentators enquiring about why the poorest people in the world are still poor when so many people have become so prosperous (relatively speaking) in comparison. It's a vital question, and one of which we should be mindful every day.

But an equally interesting question is the opposite one: why, in fact, are so many people so prosperous? You see, prosperity is not the default state of human beings - poverty and hardship is. For most of our history we have been struggling through poverty and hardship.

The story of human history for the past 200,000 years goes roughly like this. For the past 199,800 of those 200,000 years we had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitivism, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality.

People’s earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes in more recent times) until something came along to change all that in the nineteenth century. What happened was that people started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly (it’s still going on).

What caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression was primarily two things – science and capitalism. This science and capitalist-based progression can be explained by a simple rule of thumb – people innovate, improve and provide answers to problems – and the more people, the more innovation, improvements and problems solved.

The more ideas and the more people to share those ideas with, the more humans prosper, and the quicker they do so, despite some unstable or resource-insufficient areas where high population is proving to be an issue.

Now let’s be clear; science and capitalism haven’t created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects – but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years of human history than in the previous 199,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, science, technological capacity, and overall well-being have improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it.

Science and capitalism show themselves to be good vehicles for human progression, beneficial tools for lifting us out of poverty, curing diseases, feeding the impoverished, communicating globally, and generally enhancing our knowledge of the world. Given that out of the last 200,000 years we have only been out of poverty for 0.1% of it, the question we hardly ever hear regarding why so many of us are so prosperous must at least have equal consideration to the widespread, repeated question of why so many are still in poverty.

The answer to that question is, in the simplest terms, that quite naturally in the event of a progression-explosion there were always going to be countries that had the right conditions and personnel to experience these changes in fortune first. Many economists will simply argue that these countries still in poverty need to be opened up more to the global market.

This is true, and they certainly have the natural resources to do so. But I think that's only half the battle - the other side of it is the science. Countries that have resources to trade but with poor scientific potential will probably be the ones to reach prosperity last, particularly given that scientific capabilities involve a lot of investment from government.

As has happened in the past 150 years in the UK and USA, and as had happened more recently in about a fifth of the time in places like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong, developing countries get a foot on the ladder of prosperity and begin to become more open to the vital market forces of globalisation that will bring them economic growth and increased prosperity.

Many developing nations haven’t had their progression-explosion yet – and yet even though they have many resources with which to trade, if they lack the political stability, social conditions, capacity for trading more freely (not to mention being beset by religious jingoism), they may carry on lacking the essential scientific acumen that accompanies capitalism, and as a consequence, they may well take a while yet to climb out of the quagmire.

Once upon a time, the kind of hardships seen in India and Bangladesh now were seen in the UK then. We in the UK once used to be an underdeveloped country too. But as we saw the increased growth of capital, the advancements in technology, and the increased opportunity to trade and innovate, we and several other leading countries gradually climbed out of poverty and hardship into greater wealth and prosperity, and are subsequently being joined by many other countries, with many more to come.

What's The Biggest Factor In Your Success? I'll Give You A Clue: It's Not Your Sex, Age, Intelligence, Height, Good Looks, Family Background, Education, Skin Colour Or Even Your Hard Work!

Apart from as a token term, there isn't really any such thing as 'luck' in the world. Of course we ascribe fortune to events in retrospect: "It was fortunate that there was a parking space when Jack had only 5 minutes to spare before a job interview" or "Lucky there happened to be a doctor in the pub when Hilda became ill", but that's more aptly described as circumstances going our way. Luck and fortune are merely synonyms for a world in which chance occurs due to incomplete knowledge.

To the greatest extent we make our own luck in the world, but if there's one thing that could best be determined as a fortune indicator it is one's place of birth in the world. Whatever we want to call it - chance, fortune or luck - the most significant fact about you that underpins the probability of how your life will turn out is probably your place of birth.

That is to say, people have all sorts of ways of determining their successes and failures in life, plus lots of things beyond their control. But the biggest determiner that most profoundly affects humans' ability and opportunity to determine their successes and failures in life is their country of birth, because one's country of birth plays such a huge factor in facilitating these things.

That's not to deny that all sorts of human qualities are important, nor that our education, family background and hard work are key ingredients. One can't even deny that having many of the traits mentioned in the title are advantageous. But where you're born in the world is the primary determiner that determines to what extent all the aforementioned qualities and traits get a chance to play out into your success.

Whether you're born in, say, Bolton or Cambridge, there are not many barriers to fulfilling your potential compared to, say, whether you're born in England or North Korea (or Pakistan, or Somalia, or Burma). The determination gulf is much wider cross-nationally.

Oops! Someone Doesn't Quite Get This Human Progress Thing

Oh dear! I'm afraid this bit of research from the Pew Research Centre, telling us that for most people there has been stagnation in the past 50 years, because "real wages have barely budged for decades", is wide of the mark. It was written by someone who sees a very incomplete picture. We see this kind of absurd claim made time and time again, but it's facile, not so much in the speck of truth it asserts, but in the plank of truths it omits.

It is too lightweight an analysis to forget just how our earnings are linked to the substantial changes in the quality of life we've seen over the past five decades. The number of hours it would have taken to acquire many of today's basic luxuries 50 years ago far exceeds that of today. Equally, there are countless luxuries available today that weren't available to people 50 years ago, not to mention increased knowledge and connectivity, scientific and medical capabilities, amount of leisure time and increased life expectancy.

To use but one example by way of illustration - consider the Smartphone you own, and on which you may even be reading this blog post. Depending on how much you earn, it probably costs you at most one, two or three hours' wages per month. Now try to imagine how many hours' wages it would have cost you 50 years ago to enjoy even some of the benefits your Smartphone brings to your life - you could have worked for a year in 1966 and not acquired even a third of all the things you could acquire at the touch of a button while waiting at the bus stop for your ride home.

Even putting aside the immeasurable increase in convenience to your life that the instant phone calls, texts, camera and video-camera, music, movies, flashlight, calculator and sat-nav provide, imagine how many people and hours it would take to get you information on the nearest Thai restaurant, tomorrow's weather in London, the price of mattresses cost in John Lewis, whether it's currently safe to travel to Tunisia, and the countless other things you may like to know. And all that's nothing compared with the thousands of lorries that would be required to transport all the books, magazines and newspapers' worth of information available to you on your Smartphone.

Further, ask yourself questions like, would you rather live in a 1966 apartment or a 2016 one? Would you rather drive in a 1966 car or a 2016 one? Would you rather make Sunday lunch in a 1966 kitchen or a 2016 one? Would you rather be treated for cancer with the medical technology of a 1966 hospital or a 2016 one? To those questions, and many more like them, you would always choose the 2016 option.

The upshot is, only a very sub-standard enquirer looks to compare real incomes over several decades and tries to insinuate that we've been stagnating. Pick a dozen goods from a catalogue in 1966 and do the same with a catalogue in 2016 and, as well as the improved quality, figure out how long you would have to work to purchase those dozen items in respective years. The answer will be, longer in 1966. And that, along with the things aforementioned, is what constitutes the improvement, and blows the idea of 'stagnation' out the water.

One final hypothetical, purely for the fun of it: Who would be more astonished: Isaac Newton being shown the technology of Roger Penrose in 1966, or Roger Penrose in 1966 being shown the technology of Roger Penrose in 2016? It's probably a closer call than you might initially imagine.

Look Who's Gaining Most From Globalisation & Why Things Are Getting Cheaper

We often hear about how much richer the top 1% are getting, and we also often hear about how many people in the lower quintiles in the UK and USA are feeling the pinch a bit. I thought some here might be interested in the latest article from Branko Milanovic (see bottom of page), which gives some nice data and illustrations about some of the things I'm always banging on about in my blogs. Namely...

1) In-country inequality in rich countries like ours has a lot to do with poorer people in less well off countries seeing increases in their real income.

2) The rich are not getting richer at the poor's expense - they are getting richer along with the poor getting richer. The poor's gains are actually greater than those of the rich, as the poor grew their rates of consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole in the past 35 years.

3) As the real income gains in percentage chart I linked below shows, even those feeling the pinch the most - that's Western lower middle classes - have seen real income gains in the past 25 years, and let's not forget they also continue to be in the top 20% of the world's wealthiest people.

4) It is primarily the globalisation of free trade that has caused these worldwide gains.

And that's not the end of it. Have you noticed how much prices have fallen in so many of the goods and services we buy these days? A whole range of things: food, drink, books, movies, music, clothes, computers, cameras, mobile phones, software, fuel, airfares, solar energy, furniture, and most household electrical goods (televisions, fridges, freezers, microwaves, washing machines, cookers, etc) have all become cheaper in recent times, and it is primarily because of more globalised free trade.

The more trade expands, the more competition there is, which means things get made more efficiently, which means humans get better at making things, which means humans feel the benefits in lower prices.

The network of the free market is rather like other networks that benefit from increased connectivity - phone networks, railway networks, social media networks - the more connections added to the nexus the greater (exponentially) its utility.

Think of Facebook as a good illustration (which is very possibly where you were notified of this Blog post in the first place). When you set up your Facebook profile, you gain local connections (real life friends), and if you're like me, broader connections too (friends from all over the world, gained usually through common interests or group connection).

Now the thing is, you don't just benefit from your connections, you benefit from your connections' connections too, and their connections, and so on - because it is through that mass connectivity that you get to share in all the interesting and edifying things out there.

The intriguing article you read about Camille Paglia, or the mind-blowing video you saw of some crazy guy doing a stunt that most of us wouldn't dream of attempting, or the really special friend you now associate with who lives in a continent you've never visited were all thanks to the connections you've gained, or connections friends or friends of friends have gained and made their way into your life.

Just as on Facebook you don't just benefit from your own connections, but by connections generally - similarly, the market works that way for our benefit too. As more and more people from other countries enter the global marketplace, we find an influx of new skills, new innovations and increased competition, which drives up efficiency and drives down prices.

To read the full article (click here).

For further reading, in April 2015 I wrote an article on Branko Milanovic's findings from last year (click here).

A Tenuous But Probably Well-Observed Correlation

In the penultimate chapter of his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker attempts to bring together the tenuous linking of increased free market libertarianism and increased peace:

"To think like an economist is to accept the theory of gentle commerce from classical liberalism, which touts the positive-sum payoffs of exchange and its knock-on benefit of expansive networks of cooperation. That sets it in opposition to populist, nationalist, and communist mindsets that see the world's wealth as zero-sum and infer that the enrichment of one group must come at the expense of another."

In my case, he's pushing at an already open door with a comment like that, but then I'm not one of the people that needs convincing - I mean, as I've blogged about a couple of times now, it's pretty evident if you look the nations that most espouse economic freedom, democracy and liberalism, they are pretty much always the most peaceable countries too.

As well as the obvious point - that free trade is underwritten by co-operation, empathy, and a stable rule of law that protects individual rights - what Pinker means by 'thinking like an economist' is probably that people well versed in economics are not so heavily sullied with the divisional myths that pervade the left; like for example, class stratification, wanting to forcibly confiscate wealth from higher earners (the higher the taxes the better), enviously resenting those who are successful, failing to note when value is being created, falling for the fixed pie fallacy and feeling a false sense of entitlement for what others have acquired, thinking that the economy is zero-sum, lamenting when other more competitive industries prove to be more efficient than industries in their own country, and treating others as less important if they happen to belong to a country outside of their own geographical borders.

The link between peace and the free market is tenuous, but that's only because the entirety of our global interactions, past and present, amounts to a vast nexus of tenuous and complex correlatives. And it's not the first time that we've talked about it.

Why I Think It's Impossible To Replicate Our Brains

In my view, the author and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil is one of the most interesting people around. Kurzweil is a bold futurist who has every confidence in the law of accelerating returns, a phenomenon that predicts a continual exponential increase in technologies in ways that will keep improving and enhancing human well-being. There is plenty of evidence to suggest he is likely to be right, although for various reasons, many of which are unpredictable, apparent exponential growth patterns can quite easily level out, and probably will in some areas of technology.

On a more specific note, in his book The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil has made a very interesting prediction: that by the year 2040 we will be able to build the equivalent of human intelligence by scanning the brain from the inside using nanobots. Once we know the precise physical structure and connectivity information, Kurzweil says we will be able to produce functional models of sub-cellular components and synapses and replicate whole brain regions.

Kurzweil talks of "uploading" a specific human brain with every mental process intact, to be instantiated on a "suitably powerful computational substrate". Rather than an instantaneous scan and conversion to digital form, Kurzweil thinks humans will most likely experience gradual conversion as portions of their brain are augmented with neural implants, increasing their proportion of non-biological intelligence slowly over time. Quite how much time, he's not sure, although he offers a suggestion of 10¹⁶ calculations per second (cps) and 10¹³ bits of memory, plus the possible additional detail that such uploading requires, which could be as many as 10¹⁹ cps and 10¹⁸ bits.

This all sounds intriguing, but for my mind there is a possible problem that underwrites the above scenario - it doesn't seem possible to me to replicate the 'you' that you know as your first person selfhood, and ditto that for any unique human, for reasons I'll explain.

First, don't get me wrong, future advancements will astound us in all sorts of ways we cannot currently imagine, and there probably will be forms of artificial intelligence that we can interface with at a level similar to the human-human interface we enjoy. But I personally think that the 'you' and 'me' we each know to be our own mind is something of such unique complexity and evolutionary finesse that it will never be able to be precisely reconstituted in any kind of artificial intelligence. In a nutshell, the 'you' that makes up your first person selfhood is an utterly unique aggregation of mental machinery that can probably only be retained in the biological apparatus that you call your brain. I will explain why with a thought experiment.

Any time AI program writers try and extend the world of brain cells into the world of transmitter molecules they would then have to try and simulate hormones. And these, in turn, depend on genetic instructions which are themselves only partially programmed and highly adaptable. Simulating the human brain is not just about replicating the hardware that we see in the form of neurons and synapses, it is about replicating a lengthy evolutionary process that goes right back to the origins of biology itself. For example, some of our genes involved in the development of our cognition (even at the embryonic stage in the womb) are genes that go right back to the very beginning of all life forms billion of years ago - and these are genes and hormones that form the substrate of cognition prior to the point at which neurons and synapses become involved.

Let us suppose, though, that we overcame all those hurdles and developed the scientific wherewithal to attempt brain replication in an external agent - a computer or an android, as Kurzweil suggests. Here’s why I still think your own ‘self’ will remain unique to you. Suppose at this stage we can produce a short-cutting algorithm that enables us to reduce the human brain atom by atom and then reconstitute the exact atomic configurations of the original mind, reproducing the conscious cognition. What would that entail?  In the human brain there are 10^11 brain cells (that's 100 billion), and 10^14 atoms (that’s 100 trillion) in each brain cell - that makes 100 billion x 100 trillion atoms, which is 10^25 atoms (or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). 

Now, suppose we were to replicate the brain at the rate of 1 trillion atoms per second. Even at that rate it would still take us 317,097 years to reconstitute the full brain. It sounds like all talk of reducing at the atomic level is too far, but it shouldn't be – after all, Alzheimer's sufferers experience degeneration atom by atom, one at a time, and babies are formed in the womb atom by atom, so evidently these effects do impinge on physical states, they are just processes of natural development that happen really fast.

It was once thought that consciousness was a precise configuration of proprietary parts, and that in assembling a brain from scratch there would come a point at which the first person perspective of consciousness would be switched on - rather like assembling a circuit board of cognition that lights up when all the proper connections are made.  But our aforementioned knowledge of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s shows that this isn’t the case – at least, it shows that atomic reduction can occur bit by bit and that the cognitive abilities of that mind operate with different degrees of composite integrity. 

The problem I see (in relation to compromising the ‘self’) is that if in our thought experiment we reassembled a brain from scratch one trillion atoms at a time we could not reconstitute the unique first person perspective because the first person self would at some point become aware of cognita being partially reconstituted, at which point (and from then on thereafter) a new set of conceptions and experiences would be taking place during the restoration process. So the simulated ‘you’ being uploaded would at some point begin to take on thoughts of its own before the real you in its entirety was uploaded - meaning that a partial you had begun to generate new and unique thoughts.

Ok, let's speed up the process. Even if you doubt the effects of atomic reduction, and we instead chose brain cells as our object of replication, and replicated them at the rate of 1000 per second (a feat that would take unimaginable technological sophistication), it would still take over 3 years to do the whole brain. In that 3 years, such an activity is bound to cause the simulated ‘you’ to take on thoughts of its own before the real you in its entirety was uploaded. However much we can reduce the execution time - months, weeks, even days, it seems impossible to replicate the unique 'you' or 'me' that make up the totality of that first person selfhood, because during the uploading process there surely will come a point at which the original you and the copied you each start to develop new and unique first person cognita - cognita, in fact, that is being caused by the experience of the replication process itself, as well as all the interference at a neurological level.