What You Should Do About Coronavirus (Apart From Stay At Home If You Have It)

Because people are susceptible to what psychologists call ‘magnification’ (making a massive thing out of a relatively trivial thing), it was inevitable that the coronavirus reaction would be incommensurably more overblown than the intrinsic problems the virus would have otherwise created. Yes, coronavirus is bad, and it may turn out to be really bad (and if it gets that bad we should act accordingly), but currently the mass overreactions have ensured the damage is already going to turn out to be astronomically worse than it needed to be, especially in terms of economic recession and job losses, where this mass panic into behaviour-change is causing untold damage to industries and livelihoods. 

The only chance of preventing a meltdown (if it’s not too late already) is if everyone stops overreacting - which basically means; unless you have no other option, carry on exactly as you would have before this media frenzy broke out. Don’t panic buy, don’t overconsume, don’t refrain from travelling, don’t cancel events, don’t shut up shop in a panic – at least, not yet, not until it's shown to be necessary - you’ll simply create a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby fear of doom will create the very doom you feared.

This type of behaviour is as old as the economic hills, of course – it’s what we call “the tragedy of the commons,” derived from a scenario in which several farmers have one cow and a patch of grass (the commons) that serves everyone, but where a second cow for one farmer eventually causes overconsumption for all the cows to the point where there is no grass to consume. You can probably remember this happening with the petrol crisis about 20 years ago. People panic bought for fear of a shortage, which encouraged others to do the same, which had the net result of creating a shortage, where all the pumps ran dry. If everyone had simply carried on as normal it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad.

Unfortunately, there is not an easy solution to the tragedy of the commons-type of problem, because people try to maximise their narrow self-interest, even if it culminates in a net worse collective outcome. To see why, imagine a microcosmic version of society - consider ten people sitting round a table playing a game. The table has a bowl in the middle. The game is simple; each player is given £10 to start and told that whatever they all put in the bowl will be doubled and shared evenly, and they are each allowed to put in anything up to £2 at a time. If all ten players put in £2 first off, the £20 pot will be doubled to £40, and each player gets £4 return. 

Naturally this process could keep continuing, but what tends to happen is that some of the ten will realise that if they don't put in they can improve their wealth relative to other group members. Suppose eight people put in £2 and the other two (Jack and Jill) put in nothing. The £16 pot is doubled to £32, and each member gets £3.20 back (including Jack and Jill, who are now in relative terms each £2 better off than the other eight people). While it’s better to allow a couple of freeloaders than see the whole game collapse, what’s more likely to happen is that others will try a similar strategy, making everyone else (and themselves) worse off in the long run.

It's not only Macbeth or whatshisname in Dangerous Liaisons for whom bad choices can negatively decide their own fate in ways they didn’t expect – with global phenomena and mass communication, this can happen to us all if we are not very careful with our words, actions and reactions.

People Complain So Much Because There's So Little To Complain About

No, I really mean it - I'm not being flippant or sensationalist - it seems fairly obvious to me that this Blog title "People complain so much because there's so little to complain about" taps into a profound truth that the more advances we make, the more we complain about what we think needs fixing.

 

In one sense, this has to true, by definition, because more advancement means more things to assess, and more things that can go wrong or that can be improved upon even further. But for a fairly large sub-section of society, it's seems that it's not just the case that the better we do collectively in terms of standard of living and advancement of material progress the more things people find to complain about - it's also the case that the better we do, the more trivial those complaints become (clearly there are going to be exceptions, but it seems largely true).

 

People living in any period of about 99.95% of our 200,000 year human history would have primarily focused on mere survival and acquiring the basic necessities for daily sustenance; they wouldn’t have had time to worry about how many black people are represented on Oscar night, or whether Remembrance Sunday offends Muslims, or whether a student thinks trans women are real women. Compared to most people who’ve ever lived, a person of today needs to have a relatively comfortable life to have the luxury of complaining about most of the things that people frequently complain about.

 

I’m not saying our first world problems don’t provide difficulties, and nor am I denying that there is genuine hardship right across the globe. But people badly need to get a sense of perspective, otherwise every period of greater prosperity will just yield more and more frustration, and make us even more myopic towards the countless ways the world is getting better.

 

There’s also a danger that we could become resistant to the collective encouragement that should emerge from acknowledging what a good job we’ve done to make so much progress. I think idealists forget that we are apes; so much more than mere apes, of course, but apes nonetheless – and only relatively recently sophisticated within the timeframe of our long Savannah-dwelling history. Given the foregoing, I’d say we are actually doing remarkably well, especially in such a short time-span, and it’s only our monumental achievements that give us the cushion to enjoy such high expectations about what else we can accomplish as a species.

 

Sadly, complaining without a proper sense of perspective makes people less happy and more stressed, which is especially disconcerting, given that what causes the complaining is the very thing that demonstrates that there isn't all that much to complain about - increased wealth and prosperity. Life has to be pretty good in order to arrive at the luxury of being able to complain so much about so many relatively non-serious things.

 

There's an old joke proffered around at Christmas time:

 

Q) What do you buy for someone who has everything?

A) Penicillin

 

The joke, like all jokes of that kind, taps into a truth - the rich and prosperous are harder to buy for than the poor, because materially speaking the rich already have more of what they want. Suppose a dying billionaire asks you to put his money to the best use - you'd probably use it to give to as many poor and needy people as possible, and you'd have no difficultly in knowing what to buy them; a place to live, heating, clothes, and most basic of all, food and drink.

 

If you had to carry on spending on their behalf, you could improve their lives even further still with nice household furniture, a good hi-fi, TV, car, garage, conservatory extension and some holidays. But then what? Suppose you still had hundreds of millions more you had to spend on them - you'd find it harder than when you only had to decide on the basic necessities and small luxury goods. To know how to spend hundreds of millions on someone, you'd have to really work hard to learn what they'd most value - a football club, hundreds of cars, the world's biggest mansion, rare works of art, or a small island? Who knows? The point is, beyond a certain threshold, it's tough to keep spending on luxuries. If I had billions to spend on myself and wasn't allowed to give any away, I don't think it'd be easy compared with being able to use it to help others.

 

The picture I painted more or less describes what it's like in Britain on a smaller scale - the first few thousand pounds of our earnings are the most important - that's what pays our bills, keeps us fed and clothed, taxes and insures our car, and so forth. After that, our individuality comes out more - as we each spend our leisure money on different things.

 

And what I've just described applies to government spending and our public services too. Most people concur on the basics; they want a good health service that makes people better; a good education that informs pupils; a good social services system that protects vulnerable people, a good police force that keeps crime rates down, and so on. But on top of all that money pumped in, people differ on what they want that money spent on. If you had to choose between extra Home Office money going on putting more people in prison or better rehabilitation for those already in prison, opinions would diverge. The same would be true if you had to choose between extra money going into the arts or extra money going to improve our military equipment or our ecosystem – you’d never get everyone to agree.

 

The upshot is, it might be good to bear all the above in mind when you hear people complaining (or feel like complaining yourself) about things that aren't attached to the basic necessities – being offended on Twitter, trains being too slow; the minimum wage being too low, the country being too unequal, having to pay for your own social care out of your own savings, plastic in the oceans, the earth being a few degrees warmer, poor Broadband coverage, whether an airport should have another runway, the price of energy, and so on - those complaints are usually a sign that, with everything considered on the grand scale of human history, things are going pretty well. Rest assured; If I’d have lived in the Victorian era, I wouldn’t have had the luxury or time to write these complaints about human complaints.

 

* Photo courtesy of jasonyounglive.com

Exploring The Ontological Argument For God's Existence

A friend asked me what I think of Anselm’s famous Ontological Argument for God’s existence. For those unfamiliar with it, the Ontological Argument is this:

1) It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).

2) God exists as an idea in the mind.

3) A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.

4) Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).

5) But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)

6) Therefore, God exists.

Anselm's Ontological Argument is interesting: It’s not as ill-conceived as many atheists claim, because Anselm was not trying to prove God's existence in the traditional sense, he was merely stating a belief in God and trying to show why he thought such a belief is rational. And equally it’s not as compelling as some Christians think, because his argument ultimately comes to grief whenever it is mistakenly offered as straightforward evidence for God.

Ideas like Anselm’s Ontological Argument work best as demonstrative, investigative ideas based on the assumption of God’s existence and that this belief is substantiated by rational sense. Arguments of the kind Anselm propounded are not so much a priori proofs of faith; rather they are a posteriori demonstrations of the harmonious link between faith and its metaphysical profundities and narrative-intense structures.

I think the ultimate point related to the Ontological Argument is whether God's nature is something qualitatively different from anything else we experience, or whether the attributes of God are filtrated into human emotions (like love, grace, mercy and justice) in an inexpressibly larger quantity (this is known as ‘kinesis’). When thought of that way, ideas like Anselm’s are very interesting starting blocks for much deeper spiritual contemplations.

When one reads poetry, fantasy novels and science fiction books, the primary force of the creativity comes from improvement of concepts that are already familiar to the everyday person (however strange the narrative). If they did not pertain to representations of life projected in everyday living they would not be sold in their millions. 

With the concept of God and whether one can imagine something so far beyond naturalistic mental precipitations that God must be reasonably inferred, the question, I think, would be something like; can it be shown that we are projecting not just a quantitative change in our current understanding but also a qualitative change in it; and if the latter, what/where is the demarcation line? 

First off, how the form provides us with narrative and metaphor and symbolism is complex because it impinges upon the extraction of meaning facilitated by our mental resources. When it comes to God's word in scripture we extract meaning and contextualisation, but that meaning and contextualisation is played out against a further backdrop of meaning and contextualisation in being itself - a sort of meta-meaning and meta-contextualisation. For example, a parable about human kindness and solicitude like the Parable of the Good Samaritan has meaning based on singular instances of helping those in need, but a broader meta-meaning can be extracted from the story related to the overall well-being of the human race and the psychological development of those who act with great concern for others. 

One of my favourite allusions to the Ontological Argument is in the Narnia tale The Silver Chair – it's known as Puddleglum's speech:

‘One word, Ma’am.  All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst of things and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. .Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just four babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia. So we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland’.

The upper world is Aslan's world, which of course represents what Christ drives us towards in a relationship with Him. Just like Pascal’s wager, C.S. Lewis is stating what we could call ‘Puddleglum's Wager’ - which expresses that even if Jesus isn’t God, it is still a better life pursuing the world envisaged by Christ. It is a probabilistic venture based on the wisdom of Christ even aside from the supernatural – and it calls for a courage that many find difficult, because it asks us to ‘be perfect’ - which is about the most supernaturally unnatural thing anyone has ever said while also sounding perfectly truthful and authentic in saying it. 

The quintessence of its magic is in another altogether unexpected form; roughly this; ‘Don’t worry if you cannot believe that there’s a God’ just believe you have the courage to act as though there is one, and by your failing to live up to the standards you’ll increase your probability of belief’. I think that really is the genius of Christ – and shows precisely His coming to earth just once was more than enough for humankind to fall at their feet, believe, and have everything we need for a full life. With this, you can see why Christ assured us that, for anyone who asks, the full life will be given to them -

"Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."

Puddleglum's speech is basically this: if Narnia does not exist, then fiction is more stupendous than reality - and as fiction cannot be more stupendous than reality, Narnia must be real. To translate that into Christian thinking as regards the Ontological Argument, then if Christ's claims are not based on Him being the truth, Christ's fiction appears to me to be more stupendous than any truth out there.

What I'm always telling the atheists is that I personally know of no better way to live, or no greater standards to which I’d want to adhere. I’m on Jesus’ side even if there isn’t any Jesus to lead the Christian world. If I’m guilty of making a play-world, then I fancy that the play-world into which I’m immersed and to which I’m committed licks the other ‘real’ world hollow. 

How The Mechanics Of The World Really Works (And Why The Green Agenda Is Built On Delusion)

To access the paper, click here

The Truth About Air Pollution Is That We've Found Something Worth Dying For

The political establishment and its media cronies have been peddling the message that air pollution is a big problem that needed fixing yesterday. This week alone, the Reading Chronicle tells us that "air pollution is responsible for one in 16 deaths in Reading", and you can regularly read similar stories about all the world's major cities. There is also a meme in circulation, about the pollution costs of air travel, where an alarmist has declared eco-planetary outrage that about a million people are travelling in the air at any one time.

Air pollution is not a good thing intrinsically, of course - but here's a better way to think about the so-called air pollution problem. People tend to focus too much on negative aspects of reality and too little on the benefits. As such they make lots of basic errors in assessing human behaviour and value. A headline like “1,784 people were killed in reported road traffic accidents in Great Britain in a year” is more newsworthy than reporting on the millions of people’s uncountable benefits from road traffic. Just about every transactional benefit you can think of involves road transport. And while it’s obviously awful that 1,784 died because of road traffic (and there may be further improvements required) it’s absolutely astounding that so much value can be created by road traffic. Most humans seem to agree with me, as every day thousands of them take to the roads or embark on transactions that require road use. Roads are, by and large, a thing to be celebrated – they are a great human triumph. They are so good that every day millions of people across the world risk a slim chance of death by getting behind the wheel.

To avoid (at best) inconsistency and (at worst) outright hypocrisy, the same kind of rationale needs to be extended to most of the things that propagandists bemoan – air pollution, sugary foods, air travel, carbon emissions – these are human triumphs with costs, not human maladies that desperately need eradicating. When it comes to benefits like big cities, eating chocolate, holidays abroad, and the astronomical progression explosion of carbon-based technology (which is pretty much everything we’ve ever invented, bought and sold), a much more accurate perspective would be to celebrate that there are so many things that humans have found that are worth risking shortening their life for.

If there really are a million people in the air at any one time, then flying confers huge benefits on society, and we should be very circumspect in calling for the cessation of such a valuable industry. Nevertheless, the environmentalists, blind to cost-benefit analyses, insist that rotten old air pollution is a big problem and that this fact is part of an unquestionable scientific consensus.

Putting aside the fact that scientific consensus on the damage of air pollution does not constitute a good economic argument to reduce air pollution, which is something that regularly confuses the masses, I did a bit of research this afternoon to see if there is anything in the argument that air pollution is bad enough to warrant trying to do something about it. Here are my conclusions. I read five articles - all of which tried to explain the cost of air pollution - but what the articles had in common was that they all peddled an agenda that veers somewhat from the truth. What was clear was that the institutions wanted air pollution to be a problem, so they made every effort to present it as a problem with some dodgy thinking.

Here’s a good example; I read some toxicological research that said “Cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, as well as respiratory infections, account for the majority of deaths from air pollution.” That looks like a squalid attempt to lump in other types of death into the statistic and attribute them to air pollution. Lots of things contribute to cardiovascular, pulmonary and respiratory-related deaths – fatty foods, smoking, stress, indolence, old age, high blood pressure, diabetes, congenital diseases, jobs exposed to dust and allergens – it’s simply misleading to ascribe them to air pollution, and reason that we should all cut down on driving and flying.

There is also the ‘framing effect’ tactic which is regularly used, as I saw in another article, which stated that “air pollution causes more deaths than malnutrition”. One way to look at it is to say how terrible that must be because malnutrition is such a big killer. Another way to look at it is to say we must have done well if the thing that decimated populations for hundreds of thousands of years is no longer the primary cause of our death. In other words, you have to make some pretty remarkable advances as a species to get to the stage where air pollution causes more deaths than malnutrition, especially when you factor in the dubious causalities I mentioned above, and the immense benefits of living in cities (already 55% of people live in cities, and another 2.5 billion are expected to move to a city by 2050).

Air pollution is a temporary problem, which will be improved upon with our technological advances. In the meantime, air pollution is the result of living for so long in such prosperity, in cities with a richer diversity and multitude of benefits that our ancestors who died young of malnutrition and infectious diseases would consider luxurious.

You have to ask some serious questions about why these people are deliberately inflating the supposed severity of these matters – and in particular, why they are manipulating the data and their language to make it sound like their ideology is the right one. The upshot is, the argument that our deaths are related to a single cause that’s easily attributable to air pollution is absolutely ludicrous; and furthermore, the fact that we are living long enough and prosperously enough to suffer the side effects of such overall higher standard of living, technological advancement and material enrichment, is part of the greatest victory humanity has ever enjoyed. The solution to the world's climate situations is to be found in trade, competition, technological innovation and the sharing of ideas – not in absurdist extreme politics.

Food Banks Are Part Of Capitalism's Success

I was interested to read this debate, which began with Labour MP Zarah Sultan bemoaning the fact that “There are more food banks in Britain than there are McDonald’s restaurants”, and the Tory MP Therese Coffey replying that “food banks are the perfect way to help the poor”.

 

Until today, I didn’t know that there are more food banks in Britain than there are McDonald’s restaurants, but it’s a very interesting fact, because if you laud McDonald’s as a capitalist success in providing thousands of jobs and thousands of hungry people with cheap fast food, then you should laud food banks as part of capitalism’s success in providing Brits with so much opportunity to voluntarily donate food to those in need of a helping hand.

It’s true we should lament the fact that there is so much reliance on foodbanks; but that is no more the fault of capitalism than headaches are the fault of paracetamol or wounds are the fault of bandages. Quite the reverse, capitalism is to poverty as paracetamol is to headaches - it generally makes the problem better, not worse.

If we all agree that hunger is bad, that no one should be hungry, and that if plenty of people are using food banks there must be plenty of hunger, then it’s absurd to identify the solution to a problem as the thing that’s wrong in the first place. Food banks are a triumph, they provide a way for volunteers to help others in ways that the government fails to help them. But they are mostly a way for humans to volunteer to help each other. They are one of the successes of the free market.

 

Bill Gates Gets This One Entirely Wrong

On New Year’s Eve, multi-billionaire Bill Gates called for raising taxes even higher on rich people like himself in order to reduce inequality. Here’s how he thinks it should be done:

“Although I’m not an expert on the tax code, I think America should shift more of the tax burden onto capital, including by raising the capital gains tax, probably to the same level as taxes on labour.”

There are three big problems with his idea.

Firstly, it's a bad idea because taxing capital disincentivises capital accumulation, and therefore negatively affects investment, production and labour. But it’s worse than that, because in the current tax systems money is taxed multiple times, which produces even greater inefficiencies and retardations of economic development. Taxing your earnings and then your capital amounts to double taxation, because capital gains are the fruits from the income that has already been taxed once. Taxing both income and capital is like fining a pedestrian for being drunk and then fining him again half an hour later for having too much alcohol in his bloodstream. Moreover, what Gates seems to have missed is that taxing capital is also a deferred tax on labour, because capital is earned by past labour that has already been taxed at the point of earnings, and is therefore the deferred benefits of past labour. Tax the capital that is the present reward for past labour and you’re double taxing the original labour.

Secondly, Bill Gates' proposal misunderstands something fundamental about who really pays for the capital taxes. Here's why poorer people are hurt most by taxing rich people's capital. If a rich man has £1 million pounds and puts it in a suitcase in his loft, the rest of the world is richer by £1 million pounds because that's £1 million pounds' worth of resources that aren't being consumed. In economics, people are negatively affected not by other people's hoarding of money, but by other people's spending or use of resources. This is because people aren’t rich by having money - they are rich because of what that money buys (goods, free time, holidays, etc). When Jack earns a bank note and doesn't spend it, the rest of the world is one bank note richer, because Jack produced one bank note's worth of goods and didn't consume them. By not using fuel, there is more for everyone else; by not having a big mansion there is more bricks and mortar for everyone else; by not buying a yacht there are more raw materials for those who might wish to build a shed or a new porch.

I said that in hoarding his bank notes and not spending them on resources, Jack leaves more for everyone else. How are those extra resources shared around? Well it depends on how the savings are made. If Jack puts £1 million pounds worth of banknotes in his loft and never touches them, then everyone else is better off by £1 million pounds, which they'll find by having the prices of goods driven down. If Jack takes his £1 million pounds out of the loft and puts it in his bank he will bid down interest rates to the tune that others will be able to afford £1 million pounds worth of goods or services. Conversely if he buys £1 million pounds worth of timber he will bid up the price of timber for everyone else, and reduce the supply too. 

The moral of this story is that when money is spent by Jack we all become poorer not richer. Every banana or laptop or car Jack buys there will be one less banana, laptop or car, and the prices of those goods will rise. When Jack buys a banana, the rest of the world will be able to buy one less banana.

If we translate that to billionaire Jack, and raid his savings for tax gains, here's what you'll find. Jack's money is just paper and ink - it doesn't produce a new council HS2 office. What produces a new council HS2 office is bricks, concrete, steel, wood and glass. If you tax him £1 million pounds, you don't get the HS2 council office, because Jack doesn't have any bricks, concrete, steel, wood and glass. So those resources will come from somewhere else, which means there'll be fewer restaurants, cinemas, car parks and roads. When the government taxes Jack £1 million pounds for the HS2 office, the price of bricks, concrete, steel, wood and glass gets bid up, and the gymnasium or bowling alley never gets built because the cost is slightly too expensive.

Let me spell that out again, because so few people seem to realise this. If you tax Jack £1 million pounds but Jack's consumption remains unaffected, then the consumption costs will land on those it does affect, and that will probably be on Jill who can no longer acquire a mortgage or Dick who can no longer afford to fund his idea for a small business. This does not mean that there are never good ways for governments to spend money - just that the popular idea of taxing rich people at no cost to poorer people is an idea built on a fundamental misunderstanding about who pays the costs of taxation.

Now let's take it further, and consider how all money is spent (by both poor and rich people). What people forget most is that the state doesn't provide anything - only people provide things, through their work, their skills and their ideas (doctors, nurses, teachers, HR consultants, etc). The state can only claim to provide at an abstracted, filtering level what people actually provide at the ground level in hospitals, schools, and so forth. If workers cannot provide something, the state cannot provide it either. The only thing the state can do that workers cannot do on their own is take money from people and spend it on their behalf. Because of the free-rider problem, sometimes this works (as in defence and rule of law), but often it just causes inefficiencies.

Consider a country with no central government providing any services at all apart from defence, rule of law, welfare, roads and some light regulations. In this country pretty much every pound you spend goes exactly where you’d choose to spend it, and ditto everyone else. Let’s call it model 1. Now consider our current UK model (let’s call it model 2), and ask yourself how closely the current state spends its money roughly similar to how its citizens would spend it if left to their own desires. In a Gini coefficient type of measurement, where 1 equals the state spends our money 100% exactly as we’d spend it ourselves, and 0 equals the state spends our money 0% exactly as we’d spend it ourselves, what would the true figure be? Would it be 0.75, where the state spends our money about three quarters as well as we’d spend it ourselves? Or would it be 0.50 perhaps, where they spend it half as well? Or perhaps even 0.25?

What we do know is that it’s impossible in model 2 for the state to spend our money exactly as well as we’d spend it, but we also know that there will be some things on which the state spends our money roughly as we’d spend it. To get a rough idea of what you think the true figure might be, imagine you are a self-employed person who refuses to pay any tax in the next financial year. Instead of paying the tax, you spend the money however you want: on some education for your daughter, you contribute a little towards defence and to the police force, you help support the local youth club, you do a grocery shop and donate it to a food bank, you buy a few more things you otherwise couldn’t afford, and you save a little in a private pension fund and a health care fund. Because of this, you get hounded by the government for not paying your taxes, and eventually arrested, sent to court, fined, re-arrested, sent to court again, and eventually to prison. Your crime was spending the money you earned on whatever you wanted to spend it on for the good of you, your family, your city and your country.

Now consider what you spent the rest of your money on – the money the government was going to let you keep anyway. You were going to buy a Laptop, but you decided on a tablet; you were going to buy a summer house but instead you bought a family holiday to the Lake District; you were going to buy a cheeseboard but instead you bought a DVD; you were going to give a donation to Cancer Research but instead you gave it to WaterAid. At no point would you get any threatening letters, have to appear in court, or get sent to prison - your consumption habits were freely chosen and with a multitude of choices at your disposal, with suppliers competing for your custom. I hope you can see from that illustration how markedly different model 1 is from model 2.

Thirdly, not only is Bill Gates’ desire to target wealth that has already been taxed at the point of labour a regressive one, it directly contradicts the environmentalist work he champions elsewhere. Here’s why. There are only three things the present earthly inhabitants can do to make the world a better place for our descendants. We can consume less, leaving more resources for them to consume; we can work harder to create future value in the form of goods and services that they will inherit and build upon; and we can innovate by advancing our technological capabilities and standard of living that they will inherit and build upon. Increasing capital taxes reduces the incentive to save, increases the incentive to consume, and diminishes the incentive to work and innovate, which has a triple whammy negative effect on the three things that will do most good for future generations.

On The Big Five Personality Test

There have been many schemes of classification for the human personality over the years (Myers-Briggs, Facet5, the Colour Code Personality Profile, to name three), but probably the best of all, and certainly one of the most popular in recent times, is the taxonomy of personality traits based on the standard psychological model of the Big Five personality tests. In the last 30 years, it has become the most widely regarded of all the present analyses of personality. The Big Five personality categories are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism - and the kind of person you are is determined by how you score in each of those categories - and more broadly, how the many variable permutations of those five produce the combination of traits that make up your character.

To elaborate further, I will go through each of these categories, I will tell you how I score on each of them by way of illustration (I did the test a few years ago when it was still free - you might have to pay now), what that means intrinsically in each category, and what sort of character that makes me and others in terms of combination of categories. I will finish by trying to extrapolate from the data some general observations that I think will hold humans in good stead in their career-based deliberations.

Openness

Openness tends to mean openness to experience, and it describes a dimension of personality that enjoys intellectual curiosity, appreciation of art, sensitivity to beauty, and often broad, expressive interests. People with a low score on openness tend to have narrow interests, and be quite conservative and resistant to change. I score very highly on openness (generally around the 85th percentile), which is unsurprising because I enjoy being very curious, flexible, tolerant and receptive to ideas.

But equally, people who are high in openness and highly intelligent will also often be quite rigid in their views, and I will explain why. The reason I don't score even higher in openness is because I score low on some aspects of standard openness like gullibility, indifference, conformity and being too easily adaptable.

This is a good balance to strike: be high in openness, and yet be unwilling to adapt to anything that is empirically dubious, psychologically stultifying or intellectually lazy. Open people ought to have strong convictions in a whole range of subjects about which they've drawn conclusions. Many people who score high in openness tend to be quite assured about their views and beliefs because they were open enough to explore them rigorously in the first place.

Conscientiousness

Conscientious people tend to be smart, goal-oriented and purposeful, but they can also be overly-assiduous, unreliable and unadventurous. I score quite highly on conscientiousness (generally around the 70th percentile) which is quite a good combinatorial quality to have with high openness. Conscientious people who are goal-oriented and ambitious in their intellectual pursuits, and at the same time high in openness, are likely to explore ideas very freely and gracefully and arrive at firm conclusions based on well thought out methodologies. High conscientiousness is one of the strongest predictors of career success, so if you score highly on that, you might like to consider whether you could be aiming for even greater career heights.

Extraversion

Extraversion and introversion are quite well known traits, and it's fairly easy to observe in people where they sit on this spectrum. Extraverts enjoy being with people, are energetic, and often experience positive emotions. Introverts are the opposite; they tend to be quieter, more insular and less socially active. I score very highly on extraversion (generally around the 80th percentile), which is interesting because I am rather like an introvert trapped in an extravert's body. Like other extraverts, I thrive by associating with others and being exploratory in nature when it comes to other people's personalities, but I am also frequently exhilarated by solitary pursuits and can go without socialising for sustained periods of time. Keep an eye out for the introverts in your team who are also high in openness and conscientiousness – they may have great ideas that are not being expressed within the team, and therefore not heard.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness is a lot to do with cooperation and social harmony. Agreeable individuals tend to value getting along with others, and are friendly, gregarious and generous. I score quite highly on agreeableness (generally around the 65th percentile) and that may be surprising to some, given my no-nonsense approach to establishing truth and facts. But it isn't very surprising to me, because even though I value competition of ideas and hardline rigour, I do value relationships with people very highly, care about their well-being, and have a high regard for mutual cooperation, despite being quite feline in nature (which probably explains why I only score moderately high on agreeableness).

Neuroticism

Neuroticism refers to the tendency to experience negative emotions. People who score highly on this tend to have a greater susceptibility to anxiety, anger, or depression. I score relatively low on neuroticism (generally around 30th percentile) because I am quite low in intensity, fairly easy-going, and unlikely to respond emotionally erratically to situations that require a calm, balanced response. Being high in openness, it's good that I'm relatively low in neuroticism, as they can be a problematical pair, because open people tend to be exploratory and enjoy complexity and philosophical intractability - and if you're high in neuroticism you may find this difficult and emotionally challenging. Neuroticism does have advantages, particularly if you're high in conscientiousness, like caring for your own well-being, and knowing yourself well, meaning you're quite open about your emotions.

Bringing this together

There are numerous combinatorial links to these different personality scores, and there isn't a typical optimum profile to which one ought to gravitate, because there are contrasts in each trait that bring to bear different strengths and weaknesses on the personality. For example, people who score high on extraversion may have the positive quality of being intellectually adventurous, but people who score low may be quite cautious in a way that makes them unsusceptible to flights of fancy. A team that has one of each will often perform better than a team that has two of one or two of the other. People who score high on agreeableness may be gentle, but people who score low might have a reliable strength of their convictions. People who score high on openness may reap the many benefits of not having too much of a closed mind, but people who score low on openness may not drift waywardly so often, and remain quite grounded in some views.

Agreeable people can be kind, thoughtful and compassionate, but are often vulnerable to manipulation. Disagreeable people may be a strong, influential force in the workplace, but they may not have much of ear for compromise when it comes to listening to people’s needs. IQ is an excellent predictor of academic achievement and career accomplishment, as is conscientiousness – and you’re more likely to thrive if you score highly in extraversion and low in neuroticism.

It can be hugely beneficial to complete your own Big Five personality test, because the five basic dimensions of the personality have reliable predictability of performance in the workplace, as well as in relationships and other forms of interpersonal interaction. With a more thorough understanding of the core essence of your personality, you get to understand how you’re likely to react in adapting to a rapidly changing situation, whether your ideas are likely to be heard in a meeting, how well equipped you are to take the lead in complex situations, how you’re likely to handle those difficult conversations, whether you’re a good motivator, whether you are more likely to thrive working on your own initiative or as part of a team, whether you’re more suited to working with people or with things – the list goes on. The Big Five test can also provide clarity in identifying your talents, skills and character, whereby it can help you ensure you’re performing the right role in the right job, and it can help you in navigating a career path that will give you better job satisfaction and a higher level of contentment.

The Big Five could be a fun thing to try if you're part of a couple too, or even if you're looking to find a beloved - it can help identify your key relationship strengths and weaknesses, it can assist you in ways to complement and learn from each other, or simply help you understand your personality profile better to help find you a good match in the dating pool.

Whichever way it engenders the most benefit for you - whether it be in your career, in love, in your social milieu, or simply as a way to understand yourself better (as per Socrates' great instruction to 'know thyself'), understanding your personality at a deeper level is going to be hugely beneficial for you in a number of ways.

 

The Spurious Arithmetic Of So-Called 'Unfair Privilege'

In a recent Facebook post in response to John McDonnell's desire for forcing harmful redistributive policies on the UK, I explained that, in terms of what we can control, wealth distribution generally follows the following kind of rule of thumb:

1) The harder you work, the better you do in life

2) The more effort you put in to improving your life, the better you do in life

3) The more intelligent, knowledgeable, conscientious and committed you are, the better you do in life

4) The more time you spend wisely and not wastefully, the better you do in life

5) The better your attitude, and the better and more kindly you treat others, the better you do in life

6) The more value you can provide to enhance others' lives, the better you do in life

7) The more you invest wisely in your future, and the less you disadvantage yourself now with unwholesome, selfish, careless and costly pursuits, the better you do in life

8) The better your life choices, the better you do in life

9) The more thoughtful, empathetic, aspirational, creative, imaginative, dedicated and inspiring you try to become, the better you do in life

There is no better, more reliable, more ethical, more empirically robust system for how wealth is distributed than the system above. And that's a fact!

A friend challenged this by talking about how society is geared towards inequality, and how you’re more likely to succeed if you come from a privileged background. He was referring to statistics like this:

"Although just 7% of the population attend independent fee-paying schools, the survey reveals that almost three quarters (71%) of top military officers were educated privately, with 12% having been taught in comprehensive schools. In the field of law, 74% of top judges working in the high court and appeals court were privately educated, while in journalism, more than half (51%) of leading print journalists went to independent schools, with one in five having attended comprehensive schools, which currently educate 88% of the population. In medicine, meanwhile, Sutton Trust research says 61% of the country’s top doctors were educated at independent schools; nearly a quarter (22%) went to grammar school and the remainder to comprehensives."

The underlying hypothesis my friend is positing is that it’s hard to succeed on your own merit because attending private school greatly advantages people in high positions (would-be judges, executives, top military officers, and top doctors). To see why this is the wrong way to analyse the situation, imagine I run creative writing workshops at the University of East Anglia, and I advertise that while only 0.01% the UK population get their work published, 5% of my students do. It would be absurd to claim statistical unfairness here, because only people who feel they have something to offer in the literary world would attend my workshops. To demonstrate an unfair advantage, you’d need to show that budding writers who attend my workshops do better than fellow budding writers who don’t. It’s a bad methodological error to compare budding writers who attend my workshops to the rest of the population, because most of them aren’t budding writers.

So when you have a statistic like “Although just 7% of the population attend independent fee-paying schools, the survey reveals that almost three quarters (71%) of top military officers were educated privately” – to show that is an unfair bias, you have to show that people who are otherwise just like the top military officers, but who were instead not educated in independent fee-paying schools, do worse. In other words, you mustn't discount the notion that it is the shared qualities and talents that make good military officers and explain the success, and not the fact that they went to private school.

In all likelihood, the people who have the kind of qualities required to be judges, executives, top military officers, and top doctors would probably dominate those industries even if all schools were fee-paying or all schools were state-funded. Similarly, it’s also most likely that the people who get published are likely to be talented writers, irrespective of whether they attended my workshop or not – just as it’s most likely that a horse jockey will weigh under 118lb irrespective of whether they had contacts in the horse racing world nor not.

Even if John McDonnell thinks he can drastically reduce the advantages of a privileged background by a socialist intervention, he can’t eliminate the advantages of intelligence, conscientiousness, hard work, commitment, dedication and wise life choices when they are so vital to success. While it’s true that not all of my list produces a fair outcome every time, and while it is true that there are definite advantages in coming from a privileged background, the notion that politicians can equalise those differences is highly dubious, especially as they make no attempt to show that the statistical differentials are driven by unfair discrimination, and not by shared characteristics (like literary prowess in publishing, or height and weight in horse racing) that procure them a natural advantage in society.

Why You Should Scrap The Office Secret Santa

 

There's a famous paradox called the Abilene paradox, based on an account of a family of four adults who had taken a day out to Abilene even though none of the individuals really wanted to go. Each family member expressed an interest in going on the trip due to thinking the other three family members wanted to go, only to find out on their return that none of the four had wanted to go in the first place. They did it to keep the others happy – which is a noble gesture, even if initial honesty might have produced a better outcome.

 

The dreaded office-based Secret Santa is a good example of an Abiline paradox – the vast majority of people wish it didn’t exist, but act as though they are happy it does because they think they’d be the lone party pooper. They wouldn’t be: secretly most of their colleagues feel the same, but are staying equally silent on the matter.

 

Secret Santa is advertised as each team member buying a gift for the one person they draw out of the hat. In reality, though, it is each team member entering into an obligation to not have to buy a gift for the rest of the team that they didn’t draw out of the hat. In a team of 8 members, Secret Santa isn’t introduced for the purposes of Jack buying a gift for one person, it’s so Jack doesn’t have to buy gifts for the other six. This is understandable too – a work team of 8 members would exchange a total of 54 gifts if they all bought one for each other - and almost nobody would relish that prospect.

 

The total number of Secret Santa gifts purchased in a team of 8 members is 8, which makes Secret Santa fun and worthwhile on the surface. But whoever originally thought up the Secret Santa idea did so because he or she knew that things are better when all the pressure is off staff members - when they don’t have to worry about who is buying what for whom, whether there will be an imbalance in the giving-receiving ratio, and whether exchanges have price equivalence.

 

Secret Santa is preferable to each member buying everyone else a gift, but even more preferable to Secret Santa is having no Secret Santa at all – thereby creating a team that is saved the obligation of buying any gifts whatsoever. Ask anyone on the quiet if they’d rather we didn’t do Secret Santa in the office this year and most will happily say no. Ask a team together and most will say yes. That’s the Abilene paradox in action; everyone saying yes when they really mean no, because they think everyone else wants yes. Consequently, if you want to do your team a favour, go in the office and declare that you no longer want the team to do Secret Santa. They’ll love you for it.

I Hate Titiana McGrath!!!

I hate Titiana McGrath! I hate her because she’s so good, so on the money, and is doing exactly what I wished I’d have done years ago by getting in first (she’s a he, of course, a fictional creation of comedian Andrew Doyle). From Wiki:

“She is a social justice warrior who promotes identity politics and political correctness on her Twitter account. McGrath characterizes herself as a "radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest," while her creator describes her as "a militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare."

Troll Titiana McGrath brilliantly sends up the left, the feminists, the snowflakes, the social justice warriors, and everyone too easily offended by matters relating to gender, identity politics and political correctness. She takes absurd claims by many of society’s silliest, hysterical and most reactionary people, extends the logic to a biting, declamatory claim, and then lobs in a sardonic hand grenade and watches it go off:

“If there’s really a problem with gender inequality in predominantly Muslim countries, how do you explain that there has never been a single successful conviction in a Sharia court for misogynistic hate crime?”

"If it's true that men are superior at sports, why is it that transgender athletes tend to win more medals after they transition to female?"

“Women have never been more oppressed than they are today. It’s the *illusion* of freedom that makes our oppression all the more devastating. The fact that so many women think they are enjoying their lives only proves my point.”

What’s so great about Titiana McGrath is that she entertains those who, like her, can see the nonsense of the woke culture, offends all the people that deserve to be offended for their utter inability to achieve a balanced, reasoned worldview, and yet does so in a way that confuses the offended individuals by leaving them slightly unsure about whether she is one of them or one of the opposition.

By eliciting the bewildered reaction she does, she compounds the absurdity of the very reason she exists. Perhaps the best case in point was when she got banned from Twitter – a ridiculous act that proved exactly the cultural point she was making. It’s a shame we live in a world that needs a Titiana McGrath – but thank God we have one – she came along at just the right time.

The Answer To My Cave Riddle....

Recently on Facebook I presented the following poser:

10 people are trapped in a remote cave in a storm, with rising water that looks certain to drown them all. You have some budget in your department for a rescue mission, and there are two types of operation available within your budget.

Operation 1) You are guaranteed to save 5 of them, but the other 5 will drown.

Operation 2) You have a 60% chance of saving all of them, but a 40% chance that the mission fails and all of them drown.

You can only afford one Operation. If you only care about the 10 people trapped in the cave, do you go for Operation 1 or 2?

If you found the question difficult, or found it easy and answered Operation 1, you're missing a no-brainer - you should definitely choose Operation 2. Here's why. Imagine you're one of the individuals trapped in the cave. With Operation 1 you have a 50% chance of surviving; with Operation 2 you have a 60% chance of surviving. If you are an individual person trapped in that cave, then survival is the most important thing to you, and it's better to pick the option that gives you an extra 10% chance of survival.

Now consider the cave problem as an illustration for how politics often works. Imagine if you're someone like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, who cares primarily about slogans and left wing adulation - you might be tempted to choose operation 1, so you can have a guaranteed photo shot of you standing with the five survivors, even if you've chosen the option that's the least good for the collective.

We've seen this time and time again with calls to use taxpayers' money to subsidise the failing steel industry, or failing holiday firms, or increase the minimum wage law above the marginal product. The people who benefit from those policies are a small subsection of society (like the steelworkers who make the news: "Corbyn saves 5000 steelworkers' jobs" as the headline might be), whereas the people who bear the much larger costs are the wider population who have to pay more for their steel because foreign competition is being starved.

In a Rawlsian ' veil of ignorance' system of ethics, political policies would be implemented through conditions under which "No one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like." So if we pretend that prior to being born we could all partake in a committee meeting to decide upon the fairest and most just society, not knowing where we'd be in that society in terms of environment, background, and natural talents, we'd (try to) pick the most objectively good one (Operation 2 in the cave problem), not the most subjectively good one for our own reputation (Operation 1 in the cave problem). What a shame that so many political gimmicks and superficially alluring policies are built on the squalid tactis of the latter, and not the more prudent measures of the former.

On Obeying & Not Obeying Laws

Which laws should we abide by and which should we not? There are three main categories of belief one could have on this matter.

1) We should abide by every law, even if we don’t agree with it, because we should respect the law, and no one should be above it

2) We should only abide by the laws we agree with, and we should ignore the ones we disagree with (see my blog on rational crimes)

3) We should not abide by any laws at all

I’m going to assume that pretty much everyone claims to fall in either category 1 or 2, and that no one reading this thinks we should not abide by any laws at all. Incidentally, I did once meet a guy at a festival who claimed to be an authority-hating anarchist who thinks everyone should be entirely free to do exactly what they want at all times; but then literally one minute after declaring this he became vociferously annoyed at the sight of some newly-arrived campers pitching their tents in the wrong zone of the campsite. A few moments after I experienced that, I knew I would have a funny story for life.

Anyway, this faux-anarchist festival goer aside, I think if you asked the UK population whether they subscribe to category 1 or 2, most would say they belong in category 1, with a minority claiming to be in category 2. I want to contend that despite what many people claim, I think pretty much everyone actually belongs in category 2, and believes that we should only abide by the laws we agree with, and ignore the ones we disagree with. To argue to the contrary would be to claim that there are no laws that could be invented that we wouldn’t choose to ignore - and I don’t think that is true. Suppose a new law came in banning Bibles on the ground of imposing an Islamic theocracy, I don’t think many people would support it. Or suppose chocolate was outlawed by a nanny state that wanted to smother our every temptation, most would claim that’s a step too far.

The point is not that I think these laws are very likely. It’s that everyone has their limit: so anyone who claims to support number 1 - that we should abide by every law, even if we don’t agree with it - actually has their limit in where they betray that principle. In other words, no one really believes that we should abide by every law, even if we don’t agree with it – they simply follow laws they disagree with out of convenience and social pressure, or there aren’t yet any laws they find particularly objectionable enough to disobey. There is also, as Aristotle said in his Nicomachean Ethics, little virtue in obeying laws merely because we are legally compelled to. Real virtue comes from a desire to be virtuous, irrespective of the law.

Given the foregoing, then, which laws could we reasonably disobey? As you may know, the things that the state deems illegal boil down to two distinct categories: malum in se laws (wrong in itself), which are prohibitions (like rape and murder) that are wrong by their very nature; and malum prohibitum laws (wrong because prohibited), which are prohibitions (like regulations and price controls) that are not wrong by their very nature, but are wrong because the state says so.

Politicians, therefore, impose lots of restrictions on us merely on the basis that politicians say they should be prohibited. Malum in se prohibitions like rape and murder are things we all should obey, because we want them to be prohibited, and would choose them as laws ourselves anyway if we were in charge. The malum prohibitum restrictions, on the other hand, are not necessarily prohibitions we would choose for ourselves - they are chosen for us by people that don't know our preferences better than we do (taken to extreme, things like illegality of homosexual practice, fewer black rights, lack of free press against the dictator, illegality of abortion, and many more have been strictures of the state against its citizens).

If there are any laws we should be free to disobey, they are likely to be malum prohibitum laws - things that many of us may not think are wrong, but that are deemed wrong merely on the basis that the state says so for no apparent good reason. As any good dictator or authoritarian planner knows, the best way to wield ultimate control over people is to gradually erode away their freedoms until they reach a state of voluntary servility, where they will do pretty much anything you tell them. That is why it's essential to ask yourself which laws you should obey - otherwise you become an intellectual serf, like dead salmon floating down the stream.

But we needn't stop at the observation that pretty much everyone thinks we should only abide by the laws we agree with, and ignore the ones we disagree with - we can observe too that that principle is nested in a higher market-based wisdom that plays out more subtly. If we felt the full costs of many of the malum prohibitum laws, we probably would not support them. It is unlikely that the average Jill would be willing to pay as much to prevent the average Jack from using cannabis as he himself would pay to use it, therefore it is unlikely that a market based system would create an anti-cannabis law. It is unlikely that the total enforcement cost of the speeding laws would be willingly picked up by the citizens of the UK if it was spread evenly throughout the population, therefore it is unlikely that a market based system would create any speeding laws.

Consider an illustration. 500 million people are about to experience a quite discomforting but not too serious earache for the next hour. However if one innocent person is killed the 500 million won't have to go through with the earache for an hour. Should we kill the innocent person or let the 500 million people go through with the earache? I tried out this question on Facebook about seven years ago, and unsurprisingly everybody on my friends list said we should spare the one innocent life for the sake of 500 million earaches. That’s because, presumably, people want to minimise suffering, but yet at the same time they thought that the death of one innocent person was worse than 500 million earaches.

Fair enough, but this only goes to show that humans are weirdly inconsistent. Here’s why. I'll bet most of my Facebook friends insure their domestic goods. Then I asked them the following question:

Would you choose a certain earache for an hour or a 1 in 500 million chance of being the innocent person of dying?

Roughly 50% of people said they would choose the certain earache for an hour – which I found to be absolutely barmy. I take it that they are having trouble envisaging just how much 500 million is. How do I know that most rational people would rather have a 1 in 500 million chance of being the innocent person of dying than a certain earache? It’s not just because the probability is so heavily in their favour of surviving; it’s because in everyday life humans have multiple opportunities to buy all kinds of safety devices for their modes of travel, for their DIY, for their mowing the lawn, for climbing ladders, or whatever, each with a much less than 1 in 500 million chance of death or serious injury, and they prefer to take the chance. That’s how I know: people show me with their revealed preferences. 

When considered with proper rationality, the observation of people’s general day to day behaviour shows that most people would not pay one pound coin to avoid a 1 in 500 million chance of death, but most people would pay a pound coin to get rid of an earache that was going to go on for another hour. This is why the insurance issue is relevant – we choose an optimal deal because probability is hugely in our favour. We should do the same with the earache conundrum, because given that most people would not pay one pound coin to avoid a 1 in 500 million chance of death, but most people would pay a pound coin to get rid of an earache that was going to go on for another hour, this means that most people think an earache for an hour is worse that a 1 in 500 million chance of death, even though they claim to believe the opposite when the question was asked more abstractly. We know that rational people will pay £1 to cure an earache, but not to avoid a 1 in 500 million chance of death - therefore if you approach 500 million earache sufferers and offer to rid them all of their earache at the cost of killing 1 of them through a random draw, their revealed preferences in everyday life indicate that they should thank you.

This is very relevant to many of the malum prohibitum laws we see instituted in our statute. Recently I asked my Facebook friends, apart from speeding, which other current UK law(s) do you feel it's morally ok to break? Some of the answers they gave were streaming, having a wee behind a hedge, parking on yellow lines, drug use, skipping fares and not paying taxes. There is wisdom behind these answers, because what they are expressing is the revealed preference that they don't feel that the cost of those law enforcements are worth the price of having those laws, especially as there are so many deadweight costs associated with taxes, regulations and government spending.  

It's like the old joke about Tom and Pete stumbling upon a bear in the woods. Tom reasons that he doesn't have to run faster than the bear to survive, he only has to run faster than Pete. But the bear has a stake in this too, and wants the most efficient outcome - he doesn't want to waste resources chasing Tom when it would be easier chasing Pete. Most humans act as though they feel that way about most malum prohibitum laws, while at the same time speaking as though they don't.