Social Mobility: Separating The Myths From The Facts

A follower of this Blog, who himself blogs as Sub Specie Aeternitatis, emailed a couple of queries about social mobility as per my last post. I wasn't going to make a whole new blog post out of them, but after watching a documentary on south London gangs yesterday evening (with extremely rare and candid footage on account that it was filmed privately by gang members), and observing so many interesting parallels with other kinds of rat races higher up the social strata, I decided I would.

So, this week, new Prime Minister Theresa May made it clear enough that she wants to be the most radical of PMs in tacking the apparent social mobility problem in the UK. Social mobility, like natural selection in biological evolution, is a strong genetic factor in human progression. People at a young age look to climb the social ladder, increasing their skills and earnings along the way - which means that people with better abilities are generally in higher positions.

What also advances this trend is that whenever possible women tend to partner socially upwards, as social gradations are correlated with fewer deleterious genetic variations. In other words, it's assortative mating for better genes. Obviously this translates in the social world as dates at the movies, meals in restaurants, kissing, copulation, marriage, and kids you want to go on to do better than their parents, but in evolutionary terms it's an assortative mating process with fine margins, carried out over thousands of years. It's a biological percentage game, but a subtle and long one.

There is also a natural limit on manageable social groups. You've probably heard of the Dunbar number - it's Robin Dunbar's putative cognitive limit to the number of people with whom folk can maintain stable social relationships. The Dunbar number maxes out at about 150, after which maintenance of that social circle becomes prohibitive*.

This also fits in with anthropological observation of many different hunter-gatherer societies, particularly in environments where food (particularly protein) is hard to obtain, such as arid savannah or in raid forests. The other route that over-large groups take is when one group starts dominating another, and then another, and builds up a fully-tribal structure. This happened in North America, of course, before we colonised it.

The anthropological consensus is that tribal structures begin to develop when agriculture starts to enter the scene, even if only partially. But when a very much richer agriculture develops then the tribal structure becomes more like an empire with a distinctly small leadership (though supported with a praetorian guard to keep order if civil strife gets out of hand).

The Aztecs, Incas, Egyptians and no doubt our Wessex Empire are good examples -- when there were huge numbers of peasants who could be drafted to build huge architectural monuments in between seeding and harvest times. To some extent we can regard the modern nation-state as closely resembling mini-empires. They rapidly took shape in the modern form about 300 years ago with the rise of the artillery regiment.

To use them properly they have to be moved rapidly over decent road and rail systems so this tended to force their territories into much smaller sizes than the old-fashioned empires. Also nation-states are small enough to do what empires were previously unable to do - impose a common language, and close the gap bwtween citizen and state.  

I'm afraid, though, moving to the prsent day, what we see at the moment is that some of the people determined to change social mobility for the better are, while good intentioned, rather ill-informed about precisely what has been happening in the global context, and why times have changed.

A UK background story

Once upon a time, thanks to up and coming advancements like stream powered cotton mills, coal mining, increased agricultural machinery and major increases in the production of metals, textiles, and many other manufactured goods, there were once thousands of fresh job opportunities emerging for people in the UK - creating a new middle class and transferring lots of wealth from the richer faction of society down to those now in industry.

As this continued, 19th century social mobility rose fairly consistently through the majority of the UK population, as opportunity to work begat further opportunities to work, on a durable rinse and repeat cycle. While it was far from all rosy, these were the incipient foundations for what is now a very prosperous modern Britain. Similar developments are occurring throughout the world in countries that are currently as poor as Britain was a century or so ago.

By about the 1870s, most of the relatively poor folk in the large manufacturing cities of the north and the midlands were paying fees (yes, that's right, paying fees) for the education of their children, by and large in what was called the monotorial system (brighter pupils assisting teachers in passing down knowledge to less able pupils), which were as expensive as most of the parents could afford.

The religious charity schools for the poor were also proliferating, as were the more expensive private schools for the emerging middle-classes and the aristocracy (though some of them bore the appearance of grammar schools and began opening their doors to talented children of the poor).

Although the rate of positive social mobility continued to rise, what began to slow it down was the government-mandated institution of state schools in the 1880s - but it's important to point out what should be more obvious to some historians and political commentators - that slowing down of positive social mobility is not the same as a decline. If average height across the population increases by 1.5cm every 20 years from 1880 to 1920, by 2.5cm from 1921 to 1941, and then by 2cm from 1942 to 1962, only a fool would suggest that average height had declined from 1921 to 1962.

The rise and success of grammar schools for the talented workers’ children helped things further still, and by the 1950s, the grammar schools were turning out highly educated pupils on a par with private schools.

An important decline?

A team of sociologists, led by Prof Erzsebet Bukodi, has fairly rigorously shown (and sociological surveys these days have to be more rigorous than yesteryear) that at least in one sense it is possible to argue that the social higher numbers of the population has been declining since the forties. It works like this.

Generally speaking, stabilisation of peak social mobility (declining social mobility on one side, slightly increasing, or stabilising social mobility on the other) will occur when the higher paid strata (about 30% of the population according to Bukodi) can supply from within itself enough of the new middle-class (the new professions and businesses deeply dependent on high-quality scientific training) sufficient expertise to keep the better-off (who are producing most of the value-added goods and services) able to keep their heads above water in this highly competitive age. This is epitomised by the success of London while the rest of the country is growing more slowly.

What's been happening is that most of the country’s workers have not been able to raise their skill levels both relatively (to approximately the top 30% of the country) and even in many cases, absolutely (some of this is still relative to skills in other advanced countries which are able to be traded internationally).

So yes, in one sense, it can be argued that the social mobility of most of the country at most social levels is declining both relatively (to the top 30% of the population) and absolutely (to the past). A social-economic-educational gap is opening up and fewer people than ever before are able to bridge it and join the highest social levels.

But all that said, the stats about earnings and career prospects are only a part of the equation - we must not forget that general prosperity and well-being are about more than just earnings and career prospects – we need to factor all sorts of things like improvements in technology, services, scientific capabilities, access to knowledge and so forth. We must also not forget that the whole landscape has shifted upwards, so being poor relative to better of people these days is still much more prosperous than being less poor relative to better off people in the past.

That is to say, if we define social mobility as whether you can easily move up and down income levels, occupational structures and/or levels of education or other social structures, how this compares to others’ chances, and how much your chances are determined by the equivalent position of your parents, it may be argued that social mobility is declining.

But it is questionable how important this actually is. People of the UK today have a better standard of living, access to more knowledge, better medicine, more leisure time, more films, music, books, better technology, etc than any generation that preceded them. Whichever way you cut the cloth that has to be the most important factor in the social sciences.

Getting the gap part right

Another matter that needs addressing with regard to social mobility is this one. Even if we completely overlook the fact (oft-repeated on here) that a more globalised economy is going to see many of our own domestic jobs and industries losing out to greater efficiency aboard (not to mention changing technologies), a common claim too often made is that poorer people are worse off due to the existence of richer people.

People say this because they assume it holds that if richer people are better off due to the existence of poorer people (which is definitely true), then poorer people must be worse off due to the existence of richer people (which definitely isn't true).

Of course, if you're only interested in relative status then the statement becomes less untrue because relative to a rich person's increase in wealth a poor person can become poorer. But absolute well-being of Tom is the only really important factor, not Tom's wealth in relation to Dick's. As Bertrand Russell once put it, beggars don’t envy millionaires, they envy other beggars who are doing a little better. The well off simply have no reason to view the poor as rivals; they don’t compete for the same jobs, the same private health care, or the same houses in the same school districts.

Take dental care as an illustration. If Harry gets dental care to the quality rating of 15/20 and gets overtaken by richer people who can afford 17/20 dental care, Harry is not made worse off. To complain that Harry is no longer getting the best dental care with the implication that he is now worse off, when what has actually changed is not the dental care he can get but the care others can get, is to treat a relative change as if it were an absolute change.

To tease this out, imagine two hypothetical societies - the first consists of the current UK population, and the second consists of the current UK population plus another 75,000 millionaires. I'm guessing most on the left would prefer the first scenario - after all, an additional 75,000 millionaires drastically increases the inequality in our society.

Ah but you see, unless those 75,000 millionaires got their money by forcing people to part with it against their will, the existence of the 75,000 extra millionaires has made society better off, not worse off.

To see why, for analogical purposes, apply the dentistry model to education. Going to a better school makes you more likely to be accepted into a higher paying job. But the distribution of available jobs in the labour market is not a fixed pie, it reflects, among other things, the distribution of productive abilities available.

Presuming the 75,000 extra millionaires spend some of their money in the education sector, the result will increase the number of educated people, which may for some affect their relative position, but it won't make scholastic standards any worse off in absolute terms - just the opposite. Playing a longer percentage game, the best schools will go on to be better, which will improve the quality of the next best schools, and so on.

There is also the important principle of comparative advantage to factor in: that is, the societal gain by the existence of more and more people that are different to us. This holds true because we gain more by mutually voluntary exchanges with people who are different from us than with people who are similar to us.

Alan Sugar would find it difficult to persuade Claude Littner to wash his car at a mutually agreed price, but he would have no trouble finding willing car washers if he stopped by on any of the numerous roadside forecourts we see dotted about. Alan Sugar is better off by the existence of the car washers and they by his existence, because their different wants and needs make possible exchanges to both of their mutual advantage. Take that to a more general level and you should be able to see why this is the case nationwide.

A relative education matter

Consider for a moment the difference between State-funded health and State-funded education. Our health is primarily measured in absolute terms, not relative terms. I don't feel better about having a migraine knowing that Dick has a brain tumour; my having a fractured jaw bone isn't ameliorated by Tom having a broken spine, and so forth. Education on the other hand has absolute value, but it's predominantly relative in its measurements. That is to say, what matters most is how your academic achievements compare to other people's academic achievements.

An Oxford or Cambridge graduate benefits not just in absolute terms related to his or her own well-being, but as a measure against other Oxbridge graduates, but frequently more importantly, against non-Oxbridge people. For that reason, excessive spending on education is an arms race that imposes negative externalities on society in the direction of those who performed less well. We are always being told that more needs to be spent on education. But if you consider why people say this, they really mean spend more to improve people's relative position compared with others.

There's no denying that education investment is important because if all schools get better that means that students are learning more—becoming better doctors, lawyers, businessmen, parents, farmers, consumers of art and literature, or whatever they are going to use the education for. The result is a more productive economy with more stuff for people to consume and consumers better able to take advantage of what is available to them.

Increased wealth has been important too. Everybody gets richer, which means the quality of schools has increased everywhere. The relative position of everyone is retained and the absolute position of everyone improves, as richer people will still, on average, have better schools, and the less good schools improving on the legacies of the past.

That is why education spending may be too high. If I go to Cambridge university and you go to Leicester, that may result in a better social status for me, which affects my earning potential, carer prospects, etc. Increased spending on academic achievement,  insofar as it confers status, imposes a negative spillover on others, which means people are likely to overspend on education. The analysis of prudent spending would need to be about whether the benefits of an educated populace outweigh the costs of such high spending and its concomitant status-mongering. Alas, also, in a society that places a high premium on status, more people are less inclined to look out for those below them on the socioeconomic ladder

Interestingly, neither education nor health care are fixed resources. There are no barriers to continual increase in education and continual increase in health care, because both evolve with the landscape. Status on the other hand is fixed because it relies on people, of which there is a fixed amount, because other mates are a fixed resource. If my health increases by 5% and everyone else's increases by 30% I am still better off than I was before. But if my status increase by 5% and everyone else's increases by 30% my overall position probably will have fallen.

But there are also negative externalities from low incomes and positive externalities from high incomes. Consider a school that consists of a variety of pupils of varying scholastic abilities. A standard competitive model that factors in status would predict that grades would scale in proportion - so if smart Tom produces significantly better grades than Dick, then Tom will be worth more to the school's status and to a prospective employer.

But caring about both absolute and relative performances, Dick's presence contributes an additional input to the school's other students, because his presence raises the relative status of the brighter pupils. By the same token, Tom's presence contributes a negative input, since his presence lowers the status of other pupils. The market outcome thus brings about something that closely resembles income redistribution.

This can be seen even more clearly if you consider the same situation occurring in a factory. If you replace grades with wages and pupils with factory workers you'd see that increased happiness in the workplace would ultimately show up in the company's bottom line, since the cost on the firm diminishes with a better performing workforce. If everyone in the factory earned the same wage then low productivity workers are being paid more than in proportion to their physical output, and the high productivity worker, less.

The main point about the relative nature of education here is this. Suppose everybody in the world had their scholastic ability reduced by 10%. Nothing would change in relative terms - the brightest group would still be brighter than the 2nd brightest group by the same amount, and they brighter than the 3rd group, and so forth. If everybody in just the UK had their scholastic ability reduced by 10%, there'd be no difference in relative terms within the UK, but there'd be a comparative disadvantage with the rest of the world who didn't incur the 10% reduction. .

Now extend those principles to earnings. If relative position was the only game in town then you would be better off earning £100,000 a year in 1916 than in 2016. But in absolute terms you're far better earning that kind of money today - not just because there are so many more things to spend it on, but because if you had to, for example, cook a Sunday roast, cut the grass, travel 100 miles on holiday or seek medical treatment, you're much better off having access to today's facilities than those of 100 years ago, even if the £100,000 per year earnings in 1916 would make much more difference to your relative position in society.

Or to put it another way, if you had £100,000 a year you could live like a king in 1480, but a king of 1480 would be better off being an average earner in the UK in 2016 than a king in 1480. It's certainly true, and can be argued, that there are some cases in which living in 1916 on £100,000 confers advantages you wouldn't have now. For example, if you wanted a South Bank London apartment with a nice view over the water, £100,000 would have bought you one in 1916 whereas it wouldn't today.

But that would be a weak argument for preferring to live in the London of 100 years ago because there would be far more opportunity costs living in the past than in the present. In other words, the advantages of living in today’s wealthier nation easily outweigh the disadvantages of having lower relative income compared with 1916.

The take home wisdom, then, of this admittedly longer than usual blog post can pretty much be summarised as follows:

1) Social position is not an absolute matter, it is a relative matter, and is contingent on not just the downs of societies over generations, but the ups too.

2) A big thing that affects the ability of some relatively well off people in the UK to move up the social strata is that some relatively less well off people around the world are doing better than before in terms of economic well-being.

3) Social mobility is rendered more trivial than is often exclaimed by the fact that people's lives of today are immeasurably better than at times when social mobility was higher.

4) There are absurdities to statistics if you are too narrow in your perspective. As the above report mentions, in 1979 13% of the UK population was living below the relative poverty threshold (the relative poverty measurement is really only a measure of inequality). By 2005, the real disposable incomes of those in the lowest quintile had risen by more than 50%, and yet 18% of the population was now recorded as living in poverty. In other words, despite the incomes of Britain’s poorest people rising by 50%, the official poverty figures rose by about 50% at the same time.

5) Whenever rich people getting richer is thought by pundits to be a problem, type a little comment at the bottom of their article, reminding them that in most cases a person’s income and wealth simply measure the extent to which they have provided value to society, and the extent to which others have benefited from trade with that person's company.

If you made it this far, well done, you did well - that was a lot to get through!

* Slight side note, as I've blogged about once or twice before, socio-personal socialism remains at its strongest in those Dunbar groups, and becomes diluted as we add more and more people to the mix. as more and more people increases the range of goods and services available, and customers willing to partake in the mutually beneficial exchanges. In that sense, trade is a bit like doing good things for strangers. To succeed in the market economy requires innovation and ingenuity, as well as good character and reputation.

Just as in biology copulation mixes up combinations of genes so that heritable survival traits occur more frequently for natural selection to act on the genotype, similarly the market economy produces survivability in business and commerce, where less-good suppliers are out-competed by better ones. A social mobility-conscious socialism that tried to level things out by extending beyond the socio-personal into the market economy would be bound to retard innovation and progress, just as trying to organise biological organisms from on high would inevitably be less successful than the mechanism of natural selection.

The benefit of the market economy is that trading with strangers transcends the limitations of the Dunbar-esque socio-personal economy, bringing about huge mutual benefits not just for both buyer and seller but also everyone in society too. To try to arrange such an economy in an attempt to mirror the socio-personal economy, as socialists try to do, is a bit like being in a field full of 30 million bees trying to make them all fly clockwise. It's crazy!!

The Blind Lifeguard Problem

In a week in which almost everyone in Westminster and in the media is getting almost everything wrong about the topic of social mobility, let me bring up a pertinent phenomenon I thought up called The Blind Lifeguard Problem to illustrate a big misconception humans have about problems and solutions. There is no market demand for blind lifeguards because a key role in being a lifeguard is being able to see what is going on in the water.

Very obvious, I know - but given the foregoing it would be absurd for anyone to claim that the absence of blind lifeguards in the marketplace proves there is unfair discrimination going on. In short, anyone who perceived the lack of blind lifeguards to be a problem would be perceiving something that isn't a problem at all.

The Blind Lifeguard Problem plays out often in everyday life, particularly in politics and economics - it is what we might aptly call the no-problem fallacy. That is, sometimes there are genuine problems, and sometimes there are only perceived problems that are more to do with the limited analysis going in to the perception. And then, even if it's agreed there is a problem, that doesn't mean there is necessarily a solution.

If problems can be solved, or a bad situation ameliorated, fine - sometimes (but not always) we should act on that. But some problems are simply things we don't like about the world that actually don't have a solution, or certainly not one we should attempt to bring about. It's an important lesson that many need to learn, namely:

1) Not every perceived problem is actually a problem

2) Even if is a problem, it's not necessarily one we should be solving

That is to say, quite often there are perfectly good reasons why there are very few female garage mechanics, and more men in CEO roles than women, and TV drama shows with very few Muslims and homosexuals, and universities with fewer graduates from state than private school graduates.

Government regulations aside, society is the result of billions of individual choices made in transactions where both parties look to be made better off from the exchange. If many of those choices culminate in society having fewer of one identifiable group than the other, or more of one age group or gender than another, do not hastily assume it's a problem, much less a problem that ought to be, or even can be solved.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another kind of grandfather paradox

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

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

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

And what about pollution?

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

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

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

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

The final big issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expensive Doesn't Mean Valuable

More than 8.1 million people worldwide are now employed in the renewable energy industry, according to this report from IRENA. One way to look at it is to say, isn't it wonderful that there's been over 8 million jobs created in that sector? The economist's way to look at it is to say, isn't it hugely costly to pay for all this, therefore does it provide value?

The reason the economic analysis is right and the other analysis wrong is down to the understanding that natural resources are limited, as is human labour, and expenditure on this industry is expenditure that could be going elsewhere. Of course, if the renewable energy industry creates a net value to society then no problem. But does it?

It's unlikely that it does, because to say it does means to say that we are being made as well off as possible by applying those scarce resources in that industry. Think about that for a moment. Prices are not just about signalling the value of resources, they are a coordinated attempt to share by allocating resources most efficiently.

Those who want to use steel for engines must bid against those who want to use it for filing cabinets, ovens and keys. Those who want to use oil for petrol must bid against those who want to use it for weed killer, motorcycle helmets and drinks bottles. Even if the British government created a law to say that petrol, motorcycle helmets and drinks bottles are a basic human right for everyone in the UK, it would not change the fact that resource-allocations are bound by laws of supply and demand.

The market then is not just the billions of mutually beneficial transactions going on everyday across the world; it is the pattern of how people use limited resources that could be used for other things. Because people can make a living providing weed killer, motorcycle helmets, filing cabinets and engines, we know that suppliers have done the bidding for those resources competitively in a way that assents to consumer demand.

This doesn't happen with anything like the same extent with the renewable energy industry - much of the demand was created artificially by government mandates, lobby groups and international protocols. I'm not for one moment saying that the industry doesn't provide things people willingly buy - but it's very likely the case that the 8.1 million jobs and concomitant resources in the renewable energy industry is likely to be quite severe in opportunity costs, where there is significant loss from the potential gain that could have been attained from alternative uses of those resources.

Put it to the test

To show why this probably is the case, you only have to apply the following question to yourself: how often do you voluntarily spend your own money on something in order to make the energy humans use more efficient? The answer, for the vast majority of you, will be - not very often. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure many of you try to buy green-friendly products, and are mindful of recycling. And we all pay green taxes when we consume the world's natural resources.

But the reality is, most people wouldn't voluntarily spend too many extra resources on conjoining themselves to the pursuit of a greener environment. I'm sure many would tell you that's not the case - but economics is more interested in actions than words, and people's buying habits tell you that generally they care more about the consumer surplus attached to their fuel, paper, wood and metal products than they do about investing in renewable energy. To that end, there are bound to be plenty of deadweight losses attached to the renewable energy industry.

How Humans Astound Me Most

Everyone loves consuming food, and everybody eats. Everyone likes justice, and everybody seeks it in their lives. Like food and justice, everyone loves truth, but unlike food and justice very few people seek the truth, and this is arguably one of the strangest things about being human. 

Whenever truth conflicts with long-held tribal principles, or disagrees with something protected by the false security of consensus, or challenges what is perceived to be (but isn't necessarily) ethical, or rattles the comfort zone, humans very easily disavow their relationship with it.

It has been observed humorously that this generation is the first generation ever to have the entire world's knowledge available to us at the touch of a button, but yet the vast majority of people make very little use of this facility, instead repeatedly looking at people's cat pictures and funny videos.

Now don't get me wrong, there are many interesting and entertaining things on the internet that do not come under the category of learning the world's knowledge. But given that having such easy access to the entire world's knowledge is about the most astounding thing we've ever had, I think it is alarming that so many people do so little with it.

And to take it further, given that logic, reason, truth and facts are so enduringly exhilarating, and rather resemble a map that leads us towards a world of exciting revelation and discovery and learning, it astonishes me how much of the mundane and prosaic stuff take precedence over them.

There is one obvious reason why this is the case, though - the mundane and prosaic stuff is easy and mastering the world's knowledge is hard. It's also the case that many people have never been introduced to those first glimpses of enlightenment that lead the way to the exciting broader and wider pursuits that follow.

Discipline is difficult too of course: even with all the accessible knowledge, every time we log on we are met with countless memes, compelling news stories, and many other amusing, rewarding and intriguing obstacles craving our attention.

But when all is said and done here, I do believe that if somehow the average browser could make inroads into getting a fuller sense of the exhilaration of our generation's potential, combined perhaps with a bit of an understanding of how incredibly fortunate each of us is to be here, they too will find the gap between the human potential and what we actually do on this earth quite astounding.

The So-Called Increasing Population Problem Is Decreasing

China's relaxation of their one child policy - basically a relaxation driven by the need for more workers to narrow the worker/pensioner ratio - has led to some commentators waxing lyrical about overpopulation in general. Hans Rosling's popular BBC2 lectures have gone some way to dispel the overpopulation myth, and I wrote a big article on the subject a few years ago (see this Blog post Why The World Is Not Overpopulated) - but alas, deep concerns about overpopulation linger.

The article I wrote covers (to my satisfaction) the reasons why the overpopulation arguments are fraught, and often just plain wrong, but another thing you might like to consider is that, lack of contraception aside, human history has built its ideas of childhood on how having children benefits the parents. For example, in many cultures (old agrarian, but also many modern developing cultures) having children is based a lot on spawning workers who will look after parents in their older age. Equally, even in the UK most couples who plan to have children have them for the benefits they will bring to their lives (the fact that a new life is created with its own unique life is a great and special factor too).

The fact that the world continues to become more developed and prosperous, coupled with the fact that more and more people are living in big cities, means that many of the factors that make overpopulated areas ill-equipped to deal with it are becoming less and less of a problem. The more it's the case that parents choose to have children on the basis of a rational cost-benefit analysis, instead of needing children to help survive old age or women not having proper control over their reproductive cycle, the sooner population numbers will begin to more closely resemble science's law of parsimony.

Corbyn: What Integrity?

Jeremy Corbyn is not having a great week. Even if the claims that he walked past empty seats to sit on the floor of the Virgin train are untrue (doubtful, but possible), he has shown himself to be rather too much of a shameful opportunist by making that embarrassing short video. It was a silly pro-nationalisation plug that backfired on him.

But leaving that aside, I want to focus here on a bigger part of the Corbyn picture, because long before Train-Gate, I've been told several times that whatever faults Jeremy Corbyn has (for Americans, read Bernie Sanders) he is a man of strong, principled integrity, and that such a thing is a rare quality in politics. I would say such people are half right: yes, integrity is too rare in politics, but no, Jeremy Corbyn doesn't have it - not in my eyes. Here's why.

The socialistic ideas Corbyn has on the broad range of economic issues are not just naively idealistic, they are hopelessly inimical to logic and reason, and they have been discredited by economic expertise for as long as economics has been a formal subject.

Now for me there are only likely to be two explanations for how a man can get to the age of 66 and still believe all this guff: one is that he knows the full extent of his folly but isn't all that bothered about getting his facts right as there are lots of people in this country who think along the same lines (and perhaps more importantly, can keep him elected), and the other is that he genuinely still harbours an honest ignorance about how counterfactual and damaging his policies would be if they were ever implemented.

To be perfectly honest, I've no idea which it is (maybe a mix of both) because both positions are anathema to me. That is to say, I couldn't bear to be so cognitively dissonant that I could hold views I knew deep down to be wrong just to stay in my job or obtain popularity; and I couldn't bear to exist in a state of mind in which I hadn't thoroughly got to grips with facts and truths central to my vocation.

I suppose the extent to which either of the above is true is something only Corbyn knows. But either way, it ought to scream out at us that whichever it is, the case for Jeremy Corbyn being a man of 'principled integrity' must fall flat on its backside.

For I see no principled integrity in knowing the full extent of one's folly yet not bothering to live with values consistent with the correction of that folly, and I see very little integrity in not properly researching the economic arguments, logic and reasoning that so easily expose his ideas as being harmful to the economy, to growth and to the increased prosperity of others in poorer nations too. The fixed pie fallacy, the free lunch fallacy, the 'seen and unseen' fallacies, the failure to understand the damage of price fixing, excessive taxation - you name it, Corbyn falls for it.

So I'm afraid I cannot go along with the idea that Corbyn, and people like the London mayor Sadiq Khan, and the rest of Corbyn's economically illiterate shadow cabinet are people with principled integrity, because for whatever reason they continue to persist with damaging ideas and foolish views about reality.

It's not all that different to how a biologist might feel about a young earth creationist or an astronomer might feel about an astrologer - they may concede that such people believe they have good intentions, and are often quite likeable personality-wise, but there is very little integrity in being the kind of people forever trying to give credit to long-standing discredited views when it is so easy to pick up a few text books and see the folly for themselves.

And by the way, if you're going to try to tell me that perhaps many of them have already studied this subject and simply arrived at their current conclusions on the basis of that learning, then that doesn't let them off the hook one bit, for me - it merely confirms that they are either incapable of learning the basics, or that they have a personal agenda that overrides the facts and truths in front of them.

And this brings me to my last point. Given that the relatively simple fact that competition and free trade are the biggest drivers of widespread prosperity, there must be one heck of an agenda with the likes of Corbyn as he consistently champions policies that make those things less conducive to fruition. Despite developing a reputation to the contrary as the saintly socialist saviour with real principles and integrity, why is he doing everything he can to implement policies that make the less fortunate even worse off? Is it perhaps that people on the hard left get so much of a buzz championing the underdog that they develop a saviour complex - and perhaps even subconsciously relish keeping the poor in their state because it keeps alive their raison d'etre?

You see, it's no small irony that not only is it the ability to trade that most efficiently lifts people out of poverty and drives improved living conditions for everyone, it's that when people do become more economically prosperous it is then that they are most likely to help others. In other words, free trade doesn't just help Jack and Jill, it helps Jack and Jill help Tom, Dick and Betty too. Someone with barely enough food to survive is less well equipped to help others thrive. On the other hand, the average mother in somewhere wealthy like the UK or USA often has the economic security to help others in the community, particularly when they retire or if they work part time.

And as the nation in question gets wealthier, the narrative of the socialist saviour becomes even more outmoded, to the point that they can only keep up the lie by creating new fatuous subplots, like the rich are making the poor even poorer, that we need a fairer society that works for everyone, and that capitalism is the most justifiable target for all our opprobrium. Part of the reason that Corbynomics is so easily ridiculed in circles of economic competence is that the socialist need to scratch our societal itch is dying out more slowly than the itch itself. 

Or to put it another way, a medicine is being offered to cure a disease that's been cured by another kind of medicine. And to rub salt into the wounds, the medicine being offered by Corbyn is actually a poison that inhibits the potency of the actual cure (the closest real life example of Corbynomics in action at the moment is not in Scandinavia, as some people think, it is in Venezuela, and the results are catastophic).

If you want principled integrity, you can find it far more in people like Deirdre McCloskey, Robert P Murphy and even the IEA's Philip Booth - good honest economists, and also people of faith, who have a proficient enough understanding of the political landscape to speak of what's best for everyone, but who are also not afraid to embrace truth and facts even when they are not part of consensual opinion.

Great Idea! Wish I'd Thought Of It

Rudyard Kipling once said “What do they know of England, who only England know?”, and what he meant was, not only do you not know much of other countries if you only know England, you don't know so much of England either without knowing other countries with which to make comparisons.

Lovers sometimes say that of beloveds too - they love them not just by knowing the beloved and all the qualities she has, but by knowing how the qualities and faults of others give further exhibition to what the beloved has to offer.

I feel this is also very true in debates too; it is important to understand the position of your opponent in order to understand your own position properly too. In the days of debating on forums a few years ago, if I could sense an opponent hadn't got a cognitive purchase on his (or her) argument I would try to persuade him to write a post as though he was arguing passionately and intelligently for the other side.  

From what I recall, no one ever took me up on my advice, but I think they missed out. Because I think in terms of probability, two things hold most of the time. If someone can accurately and comprehensively explain a position with intelligent reasoning but continue to think that position is wrong, there is quite a high probability that it is wrong. And if someone can accurately and comprehensively explain a position with intelligent reasoning and agree with it, there is quite a high probability that it is right.

Now for that good idea I was talking about: I just discovered today that economist Bryan Caplan has combined notions similar to what I just said above with the Turing test, which for those that don't know, is a test whereby a machine is required to convince a neutral judge that it could pass as being indistinguishable from a human. He calls his version of this The Ideological Turing Test.

This test tries to determine whether someone with a particular view or belief adequately understands the arguments of his or her intellectual opponents. The test is that the individual is challenged to write an essay posing as his opposite number, and if neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan's essay and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.

Here's what I think would be an interesting social experiment; put five randomly chosen socialists/atheists/young earth creationists and one libertarian/Christian/evolutionist in a forum and let other socialists/atheists/young earth creationists ask them questions for an hour. At the end of the hour, the socialist/atheist/young earth creationist questioners have to vote on which one they think is a libertarian/Christian/evolutionist.

Then put five randomly chosen libertarians/Christians/evolutionists and one socialist/atheist/young earth creationist in a forum and let other libertarians/Christians/evolutionists ask them questions for an hour. At the end of the hour, the libertarian/Christian/evolutionist questioners have to vote on who they think is a socialist/atheist/young earth creationist. 

After repeated experiments, that could give a good indication of who understands the psychology of the other group best. The same could be tried for any polarised group you like. It won't surprise you to know that in the above scenarios I think the libertarians, Christians and evolutionists would do far better than their opponents, as well as being able to write far more comprehensive essays on their opponents' positions than would be the case the other way round.

Confusion About Efficiency

Earlier on I heard a green bloke on the radio say that the great thing about green innovation is that the more efficient we become at using a resource the less we'll use of that resource, and the better it'll be for the environment. It's a popular opinion, but like many popular opinions, it is often not in the least bit true.

In about 3 seconds I thought of an example of where it's false. We used to have to send letters by post. Now we can email them, which is cheaper and more efficient. But that doesn't mean we communicate less - we actually communicate more.

The same is true with the thing that generates the power to email - electricity. We've become more efficient at lighting our houses - not many people use candles and oil lamps these days. But generating light more cheaply does not necessarily incentivise us to use less of it - quite the contrary, it encourages us to use more of it, thereby increasing demand (this is what is technically known as the Jevons paradox).

Underpinning all this is a potentially revealing fact about the whole system of recycling. As was revealed by a social experiment measuring paper towel usage in toilets: if you use them with the knowledge that the paper is going to be recycled you will use more paper than if you know it won't be.

Coupled with the fact that recycling paper means there are actually fewer trees in the world now, not more, and that cutting down and re-planting trees uses fewer resources than the whole process of recycling paper, it probably is the case that if we actually care about the planet's resources we might have to cut down on our recycling.

Guess Which UK City Is Twice As Homophobic As The Others...

Here's an interesting statistic, which may also prove to be an interesting test of your intuition. A recent-ish YouGov survey asked UK respondents whether they thought in general that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’. The results showed that in the majority of regions of the UK the people who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ hovered around the 15% mark. 

Before you click on the link to find the answer, what does your intuition tell you the results were in London? What percentage of good ol' diverse, highly populated, cosmopolitan London responded with the view that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’? Surely somewhere as diverse as London would return results of about 5-10%, wouldn't you think?

No! It turns out not to be the case: the people in London who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ turned out to be 29%, nearly double what it was in most other regions. Why might the figure be nearly double in London? My guess would be that the reason is the same reason that makes London so different from other regions in the UK - it's the diversity. Diversity, for all its qualities (and they are plentiful) probably also means more diversity of opinions that we don't share or like - including many ethnic, cultural and religious groups that don't share our tolerance, love and respect for homosexual men and women. That seems to me the most likely reason for what is a very interesting finding (see the link here). 

Don't Fear The Clusters, They Are Part Of The Natural Process Of Experimentation

There is a lot of talk in our country about how London is so markedly different from every other city in England that it's almost like a little country by itself. Because of which, politicians are always going on about trying to build up other cities to a similar status.

What they may not know is that there is a mathematical power law that explains why this phenomenon is to be expected - it's called Zipf's law, and it states that given a large sample of data, the frequency of any element of that data is at a certain size inversely proportional to its rank in a table that measures frequency, size or some similar measure.

Consider the usage of words in the English language. Zipf's law states that the most frequent word (the word 'the') will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word (the word 'of'), three times as often as the third most frequent word (the word 'and'), and so on. This is called the rank vs. frequency rule.

The same rule also holds for the distribution in rankings of cities by population - meaning if you compare the biggest city with the second biggest, city 2 is half as big as city 1, city 3 has 2/3 the population of city 2, city 50 has 49/50ths the population of city 49, and so on. We find that while it's not an exact law, by a very close approximation it holds pretty much everywhere you look - be it word frequency, city sizes, income distributions or sizes of corporations.

Compared to smaller cities, large cities show an abnormal distribution of sizes, largely because people tend to flock to big cities to improve opportunities, and for a bunch of other reasons I blogged about here.

These power laws are social laws that resemble natural laws (rather like how Kleiber's law of animals' metabolic rate proportional to their size very closely resembles a power law about how cities use resources as populations increase) - and there's no reason to be perturbed by them.

The key thing that people are gradually starting to learn is that things are generally not designed by a central planner, they evolve over time, and although they look spectacularly like they are too sophisticated to have emerged by a long process of trial and error with no end goal in sight, it is not the case.

The primary vehicle for progression is very much trial and error and experimentation, and these clusters - be they city sizes, income gaps, business growth models, or numerous other things that seem to worry the masses - should not elicit contempt or discomfiture in us; they are what occur when people make choices and when those results are measured mathematically.

Once you understand the mathematics that underwrites all those societal choices and complex interactions, you have the tools for understanding pretty much anything in the triune relationship between economics, politics and human behaviour.

Unchain Thyself

When I was a professional gambler I knew many systems, strategies and tricks to which the non-gambler's naked eye was not accustomed. Here's one that's not only a lot of fun, but one to which I can attach a powerful truism. This can be used as a real gambling exercise, an allegory for one of life's truisms, or simply as a party game that will amuse onlookers at the end of the night.  

The game

In auctioning an arbitrary sum of money, you play a game in which you are host to two willing bidders. You show the two bidders a £20 note (you can play this with any amount of money), and get them to enter rounds of bidding on the money by handing you their bids on a piece of paper, with the winning bidder receiving the £20 at the end of the bidding, and both bidders having to pay you their final bid. 

As soon as two people agree to enter the game, not only are you (the host master) almost guaranteed a profit, you'll find that it has the potential to spiral out of the bidders' comfort zones. Say John starts the game and bids £5 for the £20 prize and Pete bids £6. Both John and Pete are soon going to find out that there's not going to be a good time to pull out of the bidding. If John quits on the first round he's just lost £5 straight off, so he might as well bid £7. Similarly if Pete then drops out he loses £6 for nothing, so he might as well bid £8. 

This bidding process carries on, because neither John nor Pete can pull out without giving up £15, £16, £17 etc for nothing. Once John has bid £18 and Pete £19, John can either bid £20 and break even, or he can lose £18 for nothing. Now Pete has to decide between bidding £21 and taking a £1 loss, or pulling out and paying £19 for nothing.

This process just carries on escalating until one of the two bidders runs out of money, or reaches the point at which they want to cut their losses to avoid escalating losses. By then, as host, you've guaranteed yourself a tidy profit. Really smart people are astute enough to work out in a few seconds that this is a futile auction in which to find oneself bidding. Others tend to either chicken out, withdraw dissonantly, or end up skint.

What we can learn from the game

That was just a light-hearted look at a fun gambling game with a twist for the uninitiated. But I think this is a good instructive template for life in general. Don't enter into situations whereby you find yourself heavily invested into something that brings about a too narrow perspective or biased affiliation that impairs your judgement.

This is one reason why I've never had any strong affiliations with a political party, or any dogma-driven allegiance to top-down social management - I'm just too enamoured with individuation, because the healthy collectivism that is sought is only attainable if the minds that make up a collective conglomeration have individuated themselves. To borrow from Thoreau we must "breathe after our own fashion".

While nothing is certain, generally I think it's true to say the more ubiquitous, established and prominent the group, the harder it is to resist its gravitational pull away from your individualism. Of course, sometimes this is a good thing, particularly when the group's influence is positive, and your present internalism negative - but the key to rational discernment is to distil when it is good and bad. 

I think a good rule of thumb for being true to your own convictions is this; don't do or champion anything in the name of a group that you wouldn't do or champion as an individual - for if you do so, you become a chameleon that fades into the colours of group think, and you compromise the autonomy of individuation.

Think of how much of your supposed individualism is moulded by others - you'll find it's much more than is often realised. The subtle ways in which others shape us are plentiful - as we trade off the person inside for the role others wish us to play. The danger is that the role involves putting on a mask - and with time the mask and our own faces can become indistinguishable.

The auction scenario above is a good analogy for large groups that have this kind of sway due to prior emotional, socio-political and financial vested interests. There comes a point - be it on a pre-election party campaign, a cult, a socio-economic affiliation, or things of that kind - where what's been invested in the thrall of the collective overpowers the true quality of investing in individual liberation of mind, intellectual openness, and a relatively unbiased enquiry. 

Take a pre-election party campaign as a good example; once the party has invested so much time and financial resources into its campaign, it becomes incredibly hard to hold a balanced view. Or take the poster boys for new-wave atheism – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (sadly now deceased), PZ Myers, Sam Harris, and Dan Dennett – with so much at stake (finance, reputation, career) it is much harder for them to consider their views with as much rigour as a comparably unbiased person. The same is true of creationists, left wing extremists, right wing extremists, scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other cult-like groups – they have so much invested in their agendas that a truly open, balanced, and liberated view eludes them. Plus, as Voltaire reminds us above - "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere".

So, my general advice is this: before you even think of becoming immersed in the collective, make sure you become immersed in the liberation of your own individualism. Rescue yourself from seeking refuge in group think, or from being transfixed on the false security of cooperative agendas, and first master the essence of your own individuality. Only then will you really be a valuable part of a collective.

The Next Stage In The Evolution Of Politics

Politics has changed a lot over the centuries. The dominant form of politics used to be loosely based on a Christian flavoured notion of human representatives promoting the common good, rather like Thomas Carlyle's version of the great men, but in this case seeking a collective, objective human goal of divinely-inspired improvement.

Then, after the gradual influence of philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Mill and Rousseau, a more liberal approach was fostered, with a more symbiotic relationship between society's rights and freedoms and the state's ability to govern by respecting those qualities.

Then came the devastation of two World Wars, which was followed by the cognitively dissonant simultaneity of believing that on the one hand the wars showed just how dangerous totalitarian extreme politics can be, and on the other the huge requirement of the state in pre-empting such forces again, not to mention the reparation and rebuilding projects that were required.

In the following decades, for all sorts of reasons too involved to go into now, both narratives have become intertwined, whereby some politicians pursue what they think is the common good with top-down prescriptions, and other politicians continually look for ways to promote our freedoms.

Sometimes there is intellectual strain and emotional duress on politicians' goals when, for example, the common good is for everyone's individualism to be allowed to breathe, in cases when what is proclaimed as the moral thing to do is another attempt to infringe on our liberties, and in cases where the more liberty we have the less we should pursue notions of what I call fabricated equality (artificially trying to make positively unequal things equal).

Given that human progress occurs dialectically, it is understandable that wherever possible modern politics is always seeking to synthesise apparent theses and antitheses into a coherent narrative that draws on the best of past political ideas.

That is also why we see the main body of political parties (comprising most elected MPs in the House of Commons) occupying more of the centre ground than ever before, in many ways indistinguishable from each other, making the fringe parties that hang on the periphery (most notably: UKIP, the Green Party, and Corbyn's wing of the Labour Party) appearing somewhat heterodoxical in the modern political context.

The key thing that people are gradually starting to learn is that things are generally not designed by a central planner, they evolve over time, and although they look spectacularly like they are too sophisticated to have emerged by a long process of trial and error with no end goal in sight, it is not the case.

Once it is more widely realised that, just like organisms in biological evolution, bit-by-bit selection is the primary game in town, I think we'll begin to adjust our interpretations of a coherent political narrative towards the next stage of human evolution - the stage at which the system of state meddling is deracinated, and what's planted in its place are the seeds of understanding that human societies thrive and progress in a bottom up manner, not a top down one.

Is This The Most Confused Blogger Around?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Try asking the question in the opposite way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting The Discrimination Balance Right

Combating racism is one of the most essential things humans do, and like every case of seeking the common good, it is a work in progress. Sadly as the actions of some minorities after the EU referendum result confirmed, we still have a way to go yet.

But that's not what this blog post is about - pretty much everyone knows what I said above, and everyone worth their salt is all for kicking racism out of society.

No, the purpose of this blog post is to say that when it comes to racism and discrimination, and indeed other forms of supposed unfairness in society, progress doesn't just mean weeding these things out of society, it also means not going so far the other way that we become trepid little mice unable to cope with a world in which a lot of our discrimination is good and necessary (a danger that is starting to materialise in many pockets of society).

Take, for example, something that happened a couple of months ago, when the BBC sought to target supposedly “under-represented” parts of Britain with an internship that white people were not permitted to apply for.

In order to “rectify the imbalance of people who do not recruit black and Asian people”, only black, Asian and non-white ethnic minorities could apply for the BBC internship, despite it emerging later that the corporation is already scoring above what is expected of them in that area of diversity.

The way things are going, there is a real danger that the prejudice and unfair discrimination accusers will swing things round 180 degrees and cry foul against people accused of discrimination for not discriminating. Make sense? If not, here's what I mean.

If we carry on like this, I can envisage a time when there is widespread paranoia that unfair discrimination is occurring whenever there is, say, a TV drama show without a certain number of Muslims and homosexuals, or a university without a certain number of black graduates, or when a police force has more than a 50% proportion of white officers, or when there is a Cabinet consisting of more of one sex than the other.  

With some degree of irony, the unfair discrimination cards that we used to nobly play against genuine injustices are starting to make appearances as faux-discrimination cards played by discriminators against those accused of not discriminating enough.

The antidote to this shift is to realise that most discrimination is actually perfectly fine, and actually to be encouraged, because the majority of the time when we discriminate we do so because we understand the trade off better than our accusers.

Don't get me wrong, where there is still genuine unfair discrimination we should help weed it out. But genuine unfair discrimination doesn't occur half as much as most people think - it is simply the result of people making rational choices, like choosing a Cabinet or a work force based on merit, not on sex or skin colour.

Rational discrimination occurs everywhere, and for good reason. At school in wanting to date girls I fancied, I was discriminating against girls I didn't fancy. But that's perfectly okay. When I go to the pub I want to sit and talk with friends I know, and discriminate against strangers by not joining them at their table. But that's perfectly okay too.

Vegetarians want to discriminate against burger bars by not eating in them; lesbians want to discriminate against heterosexual men by not having sex with them; women usually want to discriminate against employers that run garages by not working for them; economic think tanks want to discriminate against not very bright people by having bright people contribute to their research; and the Congolese social group in my city wants to discriminate against non-Congolese people by only wanting fellow Congolese people to attend - and all of those things are perfectly fine.

Not only are the majority of our life's discriminations fine, but even at times when certain patterns appear to be evident people should first check to see if there are other good reasons for this before making accusations of 'unfair discrimination'.

Or in other words, they should adhere to the wisdom of Chesterton's fence. That is, if you see a fence somewhere that you think is doing no good, don't pull it down until you've first understood why someone built it in the first place. Only when you're sure the fence is serving no beneficial purpose should you pull it down.

The same is true of the many cases where there aren't more of a certain type of person in those roles - instead of assuming a system isn't working fairly, you have to instead consider why it doesn't already work in the way you assume it should (something our Prime Minister Theresa May failed to learn when she was Home Secretary) .

Because the thing is, quite often you'll many of those patterns are not cases of unfair discrimination at all - they are simply a reflection of a wide society made up of individual choices bootstrapped by rational assessments of taste and merit.

Ask The Philosophical Muser

Since increasing my readership over the past couple of years, through a growing following, but also in no small part due to high(er) profile writing elsewhere, I've not been short of interesting enquiries in the form of comments, questions well worth answering, or even on occasion requests for advice regarding matters of daily life. Even as we speak, I have one or two interesting enquiries from readers that might make good future blog posts.

With that in mind, I thought I'd mention, dear readers, that if it helps or adds anything to your life in any way, you are quite welcome to ask any questions on any subject you like, or even ask advice, whereby if it's witty, intriguing or intelligent enough for public consumption, I'd be willing to make a blog post on it (with the questioner remaining anonymous if preferred).  

You can either email me (email address at the bottom), or if you prefer message me on Facebook, and excepting a few conditions below, you may well find your question becomes a new blog post.

* Please don't ask me to do homework, coursework or an assignment for you. No reader or blogger is interested in that.

* Before asking something, please check the *Labels* section on the right side-bar, as that topic may well have been covered before on here.

 

* There's no point asking a question about facts or information that you'd be better off typing in Google.

* Please keep your question short. You have a better chance of getting an answer if your question would comfortably fit on a post-it note.

As always, thanks for reading.

j.knight423@btinternet.com