A Truth Always Worth Stating...

Here are a few bullet-pointed thoughts:

* Where there is racism in the world, we should do all we can to eradicate it.

* But too many people look for racism and claim its existence when it is not occurring.

* Where there is unfair discrimination in the world, we should do all we can to challenge it.

* But too many people look for unfair discrimination and claim its existence when it is not occurring.

* Where there is unjust inequality in the world, we should strive to make things better.

* But too many people look for unjust inequality and claim its existence when it is not occurring.

And herein lies the trouble: most people want to make the world a better place – but to do this with maximum effect you have to seek the truth, employ reason, and have a balanced perspective on reality. If not-real real instances of racism, unfair discrimination and unjust inequality are being mixed in with real instances, then it's harder to do a good job of eradicating the genuinely bad elements in society. A detective is going to find it harder to solve real murders if large swathes of the population play dead.

Aristotle, very likely influenced by Aesop's famous fable of the boy who cried wolf, popularised the maxim that when habitual liars do actually speak the truth they are not believed. This is why the offence-seeking social justice warriors, the snowflakes, the raving lefties, the maladjusted environmentalists and all manner of paranoid, affronted alarmists do themselves no favours when they continue to perpetuate myths and hostilities - like the bogus racism they see as a tool to advance their identity politics, the mythological unfair gender pay gap, the toxic victim-mentality, the misandry, the fabricated complaints about inequality and the absurd socialist agenda to further their cause (see here and here for more about the damage this does).

Because if, by chance, they do stumble upon a genuine untruth or a real injustice that requires action, they will probably find themselves falling victim to the 'cry wolf' scenario where too few people take them seriously enough on these matters. That's why it is essential at all times to earnestly seek the facts and truths, and not be taken in by convenient nonsense! It will make people trust you less on the things you may be right about - and people will always be doubtful around you, never being sure if they can trust your judgements.

Here is the biggest set of home truths the world will always need - it's a tough but necessary reality check:

1) We as individuals are to blame for most of our problems.

2) We can fix all the problems for which we are to blame by making incremental improvements.

3) There are some bad situations for which we are not to blame.

3) We can make all the bad situations for which we are not to blame better by making incremental improvements.

4) We blame others most of the time for things we are unwilling to fix ourselves by making those incremental improvements.

5) We do this because displacement, transference, denial and projection make an easier path of least resistance than the effort of making those incremental improvements.

6) We should all have sympathy with one another, and help each other, because incremental improvements are easier if we feel supported and valued.

7) Those incremental improvements are roughly this: seeking the truth, embracing facts, improving our attitude towards other people and things, being committed to fixing the faults within our inner-machinery.

Some people may find number 1 difficult to swallow, but I think that's because society has been spoon fed a rather anodyne narrative about the merits of personal responsibility, achievement, diversity of talent and individual strengths, preferring instead a fabricated equality and a counterfactual persuasion that there is always someone else to blame for why our lives aren't going as well and aren't as successful as other people's.

The most valuable truth any of us can learn about personal responsibility and having a fulfilled life is that proper motivation to make positive incremental improvements really will make life better, if we'll only try with determination for our own betterment, and keep persevering. This will be an easier journey for some people than others - of course that's always going to be true - but what is the alternative except for each individual to do the best they can with the talents, experience, background and raw material they've been afforded?

So here's the rule, and it's replete in Biblical wisdom: Only we as individuals can ultimately make our lives better (see James 4:17 and Galatians 6:7-9). Sure we can have help, and positive circumstances that aid our journey - but ultimately we have to take the lead in desiring better for ourselves, and if we do, we'll start to see those problems around us becoming more manageable. Just as we can't write a good novel without a good story, we can't create a good life without a good inward effort to make positive changes and fix the faults within our inner-machinery.

Here's another rule that's as old as scripture; small changes will beget bigger changes - if you start small, even small things might seem hard - but if you keep making small changes for the better, you'll get to the stage where it isn't that difficult to make big positive changes. That's because compound interest is one of the most powerful forces in the world (that is, interest on interest where P (1+(r/n))^nt). How that translates here is that if you try to be better you will be able to become even better still in a way that resembles the formula for compound interest (see also Matthew 13:12 - “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance”).

Let’s have a bit of fun to show how compound interest can increase the abundance of one’s abundance. Let's take marriage as an example - marriage is hard, and it's really difficult to be a great husband or wife. And while it’s not easy to monetarise qualities in a marriage (it’s not as hard as you think either) let’s say that in order to be spiritually mature enough for marriage you have to be £1000 worth of amazing. Two beloveds can marry if they are both worth £1000 each. A marriage that begins with a £2000 joint account balance of amazingness should then look to become even more amazing together - in how they bless others and each other, and in how their love grows and deepens - to add interest to the interest they are accumulating.

Let’s give some calculations. Suppose the beginning marriage balance is £2000, and the couple can manage a weekly addition of amazingness of just £1 each (£2 total). In other words, each beloved only has to become more amazing at a rate of 1/2000th every week for the rest of their life, making small improvements to become better beloveds. In 50 years, with a weekly addition of amazingness of just £1 each, with an annual interest rate of 10% (which is roughly equivalent to improving yourselves by just 1/10th of your total amazingness each year), and an annual compounding interval (the interval your savings will compound at), your marital value after 50 years will be £360,881. If you can manage a 15% annual interest (improving yourselves by just over 1/6th of your total amazingness each year) then your marital value after 50 years will be a staggering £2.9 million. If you add another 5% to the annual interest rate, and can manage 20%, your value after 50 years will shoot up to an astounding £23.3 million.

While the figures are partly a bit of fun to show how interest on interest can accumulate - there is an important analogue in relation to becoming better people: the more improvements we make - in our thinking, in our truthseeking, in our attitude towards others, in our diligence - the better still we can become, giving ourselves and those around a more enriching and fulfilling life. That truth will always be true, irrespective of what is going on around us - it is an ineluctable law of being flawed humans.



Why Marriage Should Be Privatised

I believe in freedom of association as the best way of dealing with most social and industrial issues, not state intervention. What we choose to believe, speak, write down, who we associate with, and who we choose to trade with should be almost entirely a matter of personal liberty, not government authority. It’s unsurprising I think this way, as I believe the state should take a step back out of many things in which it involves itself, given its mass inefficiency and stultifying mechanisms.

With this in mind, I want to turn to the subject of marriage. My view is that the state should recognise that marriage is a Christian union, and Christians should recognise that many people want to have a union that is not Christian. Consequently, I think there ought to be two distinct formal unions: one, a Christian marriage and therefore formally recognised under Christian principles, and the other a civil partnership formally recognised under whichever non-Christian principles the participants happen to value.

I’m a Christian, and given that Christian marriage is a private triangular affair between God and two beloveds (and by extension, the beloveds’ loved ones, friends and church congregation), I think it would be highly appropriate and far more spiritually liberating if marriage became privatised and was no longer under the thrall of the state. As long as the marriage contract establishes property rights, and as long as the law still protects children, in that you can only be legally married at 16, and there are sufficient legal contracts in place to address matters concerning children, the state is an extraneous element of the marriage bond. Marriage is a Christian unity; the bureaucratic elements are invented by the establishment.

Think about what Christian marriage is; it is two beloveds who love each other, and who love God and want to put Him first, and promise before Him to be devoted and committed to each other for the rest of their lives. There is nothing the state can do to ratify a union that is ordained by God. What legitimises the love is the relationship, not the paperwork. There are lots of couples who have the paperwork but not the love and high quality of relationship, and there are lots of couples who have the love and high quality of relationship but not the paperwork. If a couple has the mutual devotion and promise each other to put one another first for the rest of their life, then there is no reason why marriage contracts can’t be private affairs that are drawn up by the beloveds (or on their behalf if they choose), and instituted in the church before God.

On a wider note, the great thing about individual liberty is that there is room for diversity. There is no pressure for us all to think the same way, and through trial and error we get to shape society according to complex revealed preferences. In a society where marriage is private, people would be free to sign marital contracts that best suit their individual beliefs. But given that Christian marriage is a unique Christian concept, the church would be able to apply its own articles to the contracts the beloveds create, and the beloveds would tailor those contracts to the authority of their chosen church – one that they declare to be sanctioned under God’s authority.

It’s time that Christianity wrestled back control of its own institution and reclaimed it as a purely Christian spiritual union between beloveds before God. You see, the question must be asked; in the case of the majority of unbelievers - why would they even want to get married in a church? When the Christian church performs a wedding for couples who do not share the central beliefs of Christianity, they are engaging in ceremonies for couples for whom the central tenets have no intrinsic religious value (it seems these numbers are increasing all the time too). Of course, non-religious couples shouldn’t be legally prohibited from getting married in a church if the church consents – but that’s not the point. I can only wonder why those couples would want to if they don't have any beliefs that would naturally affiliate them to the church's ethos. That people still do is, I should imagine, a mere historical legacy of habit that is slowly dying in out in Britain as we gradually become more secular, and the Church of England gradually erodes into an even tinier minority.

If my beloved and I didn't believe in the central Christian tenets, there is no reason why we should have any desire to get married in a church, mosque or wherever - just as if we were vegetarians we'd have no desire to go to a steak house for our evening meal. In changing long-standing traditions and not seeking refuge in the unreliable legacy of the status quo, we are likely to have a society in which people choose things because those things match their views and beliefs, not because history dictates that ‘This is how it has always been done’.

 

When gay people or unbelievers seek to defend people’s right to not be discriminated against by any sectarian faction of the church, I think they are right to do so. But I think they are arguing in the wrong direction. They act like vegetarians trying to defend the vegetarians’ right to go into butchers’ shops, when what they would be better doing is trying to convince more vegetarians to give up butchers’ shops altogether and seek food stores that better cater their tastes. I think that numerous people are still getting married in churches simply because 'marriage' in a church happens to be the oldest ceremonial legacy in this country, or because society says a church wedding is somehow more exalted than a civil ceremony, or because of pressure from family, and other similar reasons. Why would they want to unless they have emotional, spiritual or analytical affiliation to the church's ethos? Realising this probably is the best the best way to forward the debate and culturally progress too.

Society needn't be so polarised anymore, and it will be much less like it in the future; just as we now have supermarkets in which meat-eaters and vegetarians can happily shop together choosing only the products that match their tastes, we probably will eventually evolve a cultural system in which people pick their ceremonial rites of passage in accordance with their views and beliefs. I understand non-religious funerals are rising in numbers; in 150 years (maybe sooner) they probably will outnumber church funerals. Fast forward 150 years and my guess is you'll find church weddings being almost exclusively chosen by Christians, and the majority of other lifetime commitments being non-religious civil commitments. We will probably escape the historical legacies of anti-church discord and well-worn religious clichés, and live in a society in which chosen rites of passage match people’s tastes and beliefs, and where those unions are a private affair and not under the authority of the state.

The Lockdown Luxury Our Forebears Wouldn't Understand

I’ve been relatively quiet on the subject of Coronavirus (just 3 blog posts, see here - which is quiet for me! Heh!). One reason is because I’ve been very busy; another reason is that articles on Coronavirus are fraught by being riddled with incomplete information (which we won’t know until after this is over) and are therefore full of pointless projections and comparisons; and a third reason is that whatever you believe with regard to whether or not domestic governments have handled the crisis well or poorly, I would prefer a spirit of kindness and encouragement on the grounds that I think, by and large, people are trying their best to get things right, and I commend them for that.

The more interesting point I want to make here is that our response to Coronavirus is a demonstration of capitalism at its finest, and a demonstration of socialism as a beneficial adjunct to the market when applied properly. This delineation is what I call the market economy and the socio-personal economy. The principal distinction is that the market economy has exchanges that are precisely recorded in terms of cash exchanged or increases/decreases in 1s and 0s on banks' computers, and the socio-personal economy has exchanges that are less-precisely recorded in terms of helpful gestures and voluntary transactions for the good of one another (there is lots of overlap between the two, of course - a financial economy has a necessary social economy woven into it, because it’s hard to be successful in business without good socio-personal qualities).

The key difference between their operations is roughly this. In the financial economy the demand almost always exceeds the supply (of a limited range of labour, goods and services), because suppliers maintain their status differential (principally income) by increasing their prices or their supplies (or a combination of both), and endeavour to become top of the supplier tree by out-competing their competitors. Whereas in the socio-personal economy, the potential supply (of a nigh-on unbounded range of actions) almost always exceeds the demand, and suppliers who care enough about others maintain their status differential (primarily their character and reputation) by trying to summon up new ways to improve their surroundings and become better people.

The key take home lesson of the temporary lockdown of much of the economy is that our ability to do so is testament to the success of capitalism and how well-off we’ve become relative to any time in history. We can afford to take 6 months off in ways that would have killed our progenitors in the fraction of the time. I’m not saying there won’t be dire economic consequences of the lockdown. But the fact that we can do it at all and pull through together is because our economic prosperity is so prodigious, our capacity to help each other (with time, with donations, with resources) is so plentiful, and our technological advancements (laptops, mobile phones, the Internet, Skype, Zoom, etc) are so impressive. None of our ancestors could have afforded a lockdown like this.

There’s no question that people living 100 years ago wouldn’t have been able to give up work for 6 months and survive; and people of 50 years ago would have done slightly better than them, but still would have only been able to give up a fraction of their work time compared to now. The consensus for a lockdown was equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of capitalism. And the consensus for the benefits of pulling together and voluntarily helping each other is equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of a socio-personal-kind of socialism (the one I’m always advocating) that doesn’t interfere with the fundamental beneficial mechanisms of the free market. 

And if you’re tempted to respond that the government’s financial rescue mission during the Coronavirus is a testament to the powers of a socialistic redistributionist economy, then your error is a bit like a man who sees a passer-by jump into the river to save a drowning boy and thereby concludes that it’s a good thing when we all jump into rivers, mess our clothes up and risk drowning ourselves in the process as we get tangled up in the reeds and stuck in the muddy river bed. 

Here’s why. The principal metric of a successful financial economy is in ascertaining value (which is consumer surpluses + producer surpluses). Created value helps us determine whether resources are being allocated well or poorly, and prices provide the information signals that help us determine whether resources could be allocated even more optimally. The sharing of ideas through competition is what helps us advance, not just in terms of improved allocation of resources, but also in terms of better products at cheaper prices and more readily available to meet increasing demand. The government hand-outs are a necessary act to help in a crisis – but they are an attempt to save trees that have already been planted, not to irrigate once barren ground in the way that capitalism does. It's only because of capitalism that there is any government or socialism at all.

 

This Stunning Picture Caught My Eye.....

The image above caught my eye when shared on Facebook. Its creators have called it a Bible Visualisation Graph. Here's Chris Harrison, one of its developers, describing how the image was developed and what the viewer is seeing:

"This set of visualizations started as a collaboration between Christoph Römhild and myself. Christoph, a Lutheran Pastor, first emailed me in October of 2007. He described a data set he was putting together that defined textual cross references found in the Bible. Together, we struggled to find an elegant solution to render the data, more than 63,000 cross references in total. As work progressed, it became clear that an interactive visualization would be needed to properly explore the data. Instead we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honoured and revealed the complexity of the data at every level. This ultimately led us to the multi-coloured arc diagram. The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in colour between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the colour corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect."

What are we to make of it? Is the pattern pretty? Yes, I’d say so. Is the Bible Divinely inspired? Yes, absolutely. But even with both of the foregoing being true, the kicker question is this; is the Bible arc pattern significant in any meaningful way beyond a lot of mathematical noise and pretty rainbow-like pattern? This is a complex matter, for which I'll attempt a cross-examination here.

For the prosecution

I'm not convinced that the internal cross referencing is as remarkable as many people jumping on the bandwagon are claiming. There is, no doubt, a power law of connectivity between the Old Testament and New Testament (and within the two Testaments), but the magnitude of cross-referencing is first and foremost because of the length of the book and its complex but cohesive narrative. Once we drill down into the accretive layers of the pretty pattern, what's most important here is not so much the number of connections, but the power and significance of those connections. After all, if we looked for all the cross-referencing of common themes in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, then we could likely find a similar pattern of connectivity as the Bible arc, especially if we studied the texts in a linear fashion (the same would probably be true if we looked for thematic connectivity in something like Derek Winnert's book of film reviews or Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - we'd probably see something similar, albeit not quite as powerful).

The other problem with deciphering patterns of this kind is that they are only as meaningful as the imputations of the beholder. As I said in my essay on free will:

"Whether we are talking about information in Shannon terms, or even as a more generalised concept, information can't reasonably be treated merely as some kind of intrinsic property embedded in the system itself - it is necessary that information should be seen as an extrinsic property of a system too. That is to say, a system contains information by virtue of its relation to another agent or system capable of perceiving, interpreting and responding to that information. For example, a computer program, a set of songs, or a bunch of holiday snaps burned onto a disk is information only inasmuch as it consists of patterns that can be used by that computer as instructions. Likewise the Bible only contains information by virtue of its relation to minds that have the capacity to correctly interpret the meaning though cognitive instructions. We must always bear in mind that expending resources on information through interpretation and analysis requires a second descriptive sense, because it is "information" intrinsically and yet also "information + mind" extrinsically."

When it comes to the Bible, a seven year old boy might be able to determine meaning in the texts but distil no meaning from the cross-referencing; whereas a Bible scholar would incorporate profound evocation of meaning into the patterns that young boys would not. In other words, the real remarkability of text patterns is always likely to find its provenance in the complexities of human thinking and the associative psychology and culture that bootstraps the meaning behind the context. What might make the Bible arc patterns insignificant beyond their immediate attractiveness to the eye is that we could probably take any linear text (say the complete works of Shakespeare, or a set of historical encyclopaedias) and form links between parts of the text at random and generate a similar pattern to Harrison and Römhild's pattern.

For the defence

Even if all the above is true - and I think it is - there is no question that the Bible is the most remarkable book in the world in terms of its multi-layered connectivity and profound complexity. And whether you're a Christian or not (I am), let me tell you one thing with absolute certainty: if you don't try to evaluate the Bible through the starting lens of 'This is the most astounding book ever written', your interpretation of it will be grossly inadequate to the task of uncovering its deeper rewards.

I suppose for the contemporary mind such as ours, a good way to illustrate this is to think of it as a book of stunningly complex hyperlinked text. We all know what hyperlinks are in the modern age. If you surf the Internet you can traverse the digital globe through a vast nexus of connected web-pages, knitted together by hyperlinked functions (like this). The Internet is the world's most remarkable modern achievement - but what makes it remarkable is the collective bottom-up intelligence behind it. It is the best living example of evolutionary emergence of complexity and order spontaneously created in a decentralised fashion without a designer. 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 it is still evolving, in a cumulative step by step process of trial and error that tailors to our tastes and needs like a simulacrum of mind itself. It provides a microcosmic example of where the complex emergence of order occurs not from being designed top down, but by a long natural selection-type process.

In the manner that's most significant here, the Bible is the opposite of the Internet - it is the ultimate top-down work in nature. But it is also the ultimate bottom-up work too (a fact many Christians are woefully incompetent at grasping), as the writers are afforded the dignity and grace to colour and flavour the narrative with the intensity of human perspective - both positively and negatively, but always authentically humanly. The scriptural accounts involve the huge conceptual wiggle room to factor in the whole gamut of human qualities and flaws: they form the substrate of every future human narrative henceforward from its creation.

Regarding the mathematical function on the x-axis of Harrison and Römhild's pattern representing the 64,000 textual cross references found in the Bible - this leads us to the 64,000 dollar question, regarding to what extent this zooming in on the informational content gives good reason to think that Divine choreography is behind the process. I've already said that the patterns themselves probably aren't compelling enough on their own. But given that the Bible consists of 66 diverse books, written over 1500 years, in different geographical places, by people who often never met - the overarching narrative and nexus of connectivity seems to be remarkably too complex to have been fashioned by mere human insight, and with too coherent a narrative and interconnected, cohesive complexity to be written without the inspiration of God.

The information band-width of the Bible and its granular tenets that form the central narrative of the Christian love story between God and humankind (especially the prophecies about Christ's Incarnation, written hundreds of years before the New Testament) is too broad and ingenious for such a tapestry of complex, consistent, internally self-referencing, integrated thought and ideation to have been written by mere men. The fact that the 66 diverse books of the Bible, written over 1500 years, in different geographical places, by people who mostly never met can encapsulate the rich and diverse historical, cultural and psychological complex of the range of authors and contributors, yet also imbue the ingenious coherence of a single author and not of a contrived message between writers, is testament to its majesty.

Coronavirus Tip: When Appropriate, Become Schrödinger's Shopper

The lockdown during Coronavirus is excessive because the law is too low-resolution to capture the full and complex gamut of human needs. While there's definitely a spectrum ranging from essential trips (key workers doing their jobs, food shopping, getting medication for a vulnerable family member) to non-essential trips (parties, barbecues, sports events), there are definitely trips out that are currently deemed illegal that are both harmless and socially beneficial.

Here are some fictional cases I just made up. Take beloveds Jack and Jill, who both live on their own and work from home, but who visit each other because they love and miss each other. Take Bob, who suffers from depression, and who finds solace in his weekly catch ups around his best friend Frank's house. Take Margaret, who lives alone, but who takes inspiration from going out to paint landscapes, and needs to keep busy and creative for her own well-being. Or take Belinda who has started dating Jack and doesn't want the seed of something special to fail to germinate; or Wendy who comforts her brother and recent widower David with hugs and help with his domestic responsibilities.

While we can easily sympathise with the spirit of the current social restrictions, there are many safe, low-risk ways to go out that impose no significant danger for anyone else but the participants, but that would be prohibited under the current lockdown laws, and constitute an unfair imposition on the people involved.

To those people, my light-hearted tip to get around this problem and avoid having to lie to the police if you're stopped is this: become what we might call Schrödinger's Shopper. That is, when you go out safely to see your beloved, or safely to provide a hug and comfort for your lonely friend, or safely to buy the paints you need to stimulate your life with meaning and avoid the doldrums of mental inertia, adopt a Schrödinger-esque superposition state of being both a shopper or not a shopper depending on whether you get stopped by the police.

 

If you're travelling to see another person in safe circumstances, then if you make your trip without getting stopped by the police, no problem. If however you do get stopped, tell the police you're about to go shopping, and then go shopping, make your visit to where you were going, then drive home with your shopping (or shop for the person you are visiting - the world is your oyster), ensuring no lie has been told, and you've covered yourself by being both a shopper or not a shopper depending on whether you get pulled over and asked what you're doing out.

 

 

Coronavirus: The Best Strategy May Not Be As Obvious As You Think

I think the safest thing we can say about the coronavirus problem is that it's too complex for anyone to fully understand. If you try to measure on a scale of 0-100 what you think the national response should be (pretending you don't know full well that the government can't do anything like as much as people think), where 0 is 'carry on as you were and do absolutely nothing', and 100 is 'the country in near lockdown', the right response rating is going to be somewhere between 0-100. But not only is it the case that no one knows exactly what the right number response rating is, it's also inevitable that the right number response rating changes each day with each changing situation.

The situation today is roughly as the epidemiologists predicted - the virus has spread considerably and will infect many more people as it heads towards its peak. We also know that the coronavirus is growing exponentially, and that the earlier the countries responded with things like social distancing and self-isolation, the slower the spread of the virus.

For some, it seems obvious – the UK government has made a huge blunder by not reacting earlier to encourage social distancing and putting us in lockdown. But as I said, this problem is highly complex, and just because some countries slowed the spread of the virus by acting early, that doesn't mean every country should do the same.

Here's why. Let me tell you a few things we don't know. We don't know how many people in the UK have the coronavirus, we don't know the dynamics of exactly how it will spread, or exactly how fast, or among whom, nor the patterns of immunity, nor the complex dynamics of knock-on effects. But I can tell you two things I do know with a reasonable degree of confidence.

First, you as an individual know your own cost-benefit ratios for every social situation better than anybody else. If the benefit of a particular event of social interaction isn't significant to you, then stay at home. And like a sorites-type analysis (when does a heap become a heap?) the older you are, the more important this cost-benefit consideration becomes. Don't take unnecessary risks for relatively small gains. There are so many positive things you can do when you're self-isolating - things that really matter; prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading, learning, family relationship-building, writing emails to friends, catching up on jobs your future self won't have time to do when things are busier, you name it.

Second, in case anyone isn't entirely clear on this, the reason people shouldn't panic buy isn't just because we should all be kind, thoughtful citizens who need to be mindful of the negative effects on society's most vulnerable (although that is a good enough reason in itself). No, it's also because, even if your short-term interests are narrow enough to stockpile, and you think it's wise to only look after yourself and your immediate family, you'll very likely go on to hurt your future self and your future immediate family too in the long run, because further down the line everyone's well-being and stability is both proximally and distally connected to everyone else's. 

To see why, imagine if panic buying yields something like a Pareto distribution (otherwise known as the 80/20 rule - roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes), where a high proportion of the necessary goods are stockpiled by a small proportion of the people - it could slowly knock-on to retard the supply and demand distributions across the UK, until it hurts people the stockpilers also rely on. Somewhere down the line, the teachers, nurses, bus drivers, shop assistants and delivery drivers might pay the price of your stockpiling in a way that snaps back to undermine the supply chains to the goods and services on which your future self and your future immediate family will also rely. The economy needs to stay as stable as possible, and the supply and demand links must flow as steadily as possible for the good of everyone. Everyone carrying on only buying what we need is a good way to help this stability.

Nobody, including me, knows exactly the best way to tackle the coronavirus outbreak in exactly the right way with exactly the right courses of action at exactly the right times - and anybody that tells you otherwise is either a liar or deluded. But I'm going to make a suggestion that has a good chance of being somewhere near right. Just like the damage to the supply and demand chains I mentioned with the panic buying, it is also probable that short-term overreactions in terms of obstructing economic activity could decimate the economy in the longer term in ways that could harm society even more than the eventual medical effects of the coronavirus.

In other words, if you’re faced with the prospect of an economic recession (x) and a mass infection (y), you are only realistically going to see one of the following outcomes:

1) No x and no y

2) X but no Y

3) Y but no x

4) Both x and y

If we assume that 1 simply isn't going to happen, that it seems fairly certain that y is going to happen (which also rules out 2), and agree that 4 is cleary the worst scenario and the one we really want to avoid most, then it's clear that number 3 would be our least bad of all the realistic scenarios. Like everyone else, I do not know if we can achieve number 3, and even if we could, I'm not even sure how we could achieve it - but if there's an outside chance that in the medium to long term the probability of an utterly decimated global economy could be traded off against a slightly larger set of infected people in the short term, then it's possible that not going into a complete shutdown is something our future selves will thank us for in the long run.

Given that a lot of people are going to be infected, they can either be infected with a decimated economy, or with only a badly hit economy, and it isn't easy to know how bad the economic damage will be, or the rate of the spread of infection, because the further into the future we try to go with our predictions, the greater the possibility of margin of error. But equally, it isn’t obvious that we could have realistically stopped an exponential spread, given that we don't have an authoritarian political system, and that so many infected people remained under the radar, so there might be some unseen wisdom in the government's current strategy, even if it seems to many quite counterintuitive.

The upshot is, even though the natural instinct might be to try to protect everyone by mass isolation and shutting down large swathes of our industry, it really may not be the best medium to long-term strategy for maximising human utility. The best response might well be a mass bottom up approach whereby people act on new information in accordance with a medium term strategy that maximises the immediate interest as best they can. So for example, we know age determines risk of death, which means older people should act in conjunction with the greater risk their freedom poses. For now, don't go to places you don't need to go to, don't put any unnecessary strain on the NHS, and assume the conditions that minimise your chances of infection with the optimum trade off in a way that maximises value for you and your loved ones in the short term but also for the medium to long term strategies of our future selves. 

To see why this might be the best approach, consider an illustration. The economy is finely balanced with a delicate framework of connectivity- it took hundreds of years to evolve and develop. It is a bit like a well-functioning brain, and a damaged economy is a bit like the process of necrosis, which is where cells are damaged by things like infection, inflammation, injury, blood flow or trauma, leading to overall cognitive impairment. The more the brain is damaged by necrosis, the worse the cognition becomes, and the worse it can become still.

Damage to various sectors of industry could work in a similar (although not exactly identical) way. The more the supply chains are undermined, the more barriers to trade emerge, the more income lost, the more people are out of work, the bigger the economic damage - and once an economy becomes damaged to that extent, it could quite easily set off a kind of social butterfly effect of shortage, hunger and mass deprivation that governments are powerless to repair, and from which humans find it difficult to recover quickly. 

The safest bet is we'd do well not to over-react or under-react, and we'll do even better if we don't get the balance of our short-term and medium to long-term trade offs wrong - but as for the right measure, it's difficult to say on any given day.

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