On The Higher & Lower Pleasures

The test of a higher pleasure, according to John Stuart Mill, is that those who have experienced both the lower and the higher always prefer the higher. So, for example, a man who could claim categorically that he always prefers the works of Sophocles to the works of Ibsen can say that, to him, Sophocles constitutes a higher pleasure than Ibsen.

There are a few problems with Mill's higher and lower pleasures - not the least of which is comparing apples and oranges (and oranges and books, and books and holidays, and holidays and sex, and sex and fast cars - you get the point), and the issue of the distinction between pleasures necessary for survival (food and drink) and pleasures unnecessary for survival (Shakespeare and The Beatles) whereby the latter may be higher in terms of pleasure but lower in terms of necessity.

But the problem I want to focus on here is the possible bias a Victorian polymath philosopher might have towards pleasures, compared with, say, a twenty-something working class female in 2016. Let me first start by trying to identify what I think the best physical pleasures are. I'm assuming that if it's true for me there's a good chance it'll be true for others too.

Good sex with someone you love is right up there with the best physical pleasures, as is eating a delicious meal when you're famished. Relaxing in a comfy recliner chair after some hard exercise is a very nice sensation, as is the feeling of freshly washed and ironed sheets on your skin when you first get into bed. A nice scenic view is very pleasing, as is cuddling, and doing something kind and generous for somebody else is highly rewarding too (you may want to classify the last one as an emotional pleasure).

But what about the intellectual pleasures associated with things like philosophy, art and literature? Is the complete works of Shakespeare a higher pleasure than the complete works of Alan Bennett or the complete box set of Nicolas Cage films? Is Van Morrison's Astral Weeks or Radiohead's OK Computer a higher pleasure-pairing than David Bowie's two Tin Machine albums?

John Stuart's Mill's test of a higher pleasure - those who have experienced both the lower and the higher always prefer the higher - may not apply to a man who loves Nicolas Cage films and is bored stiff by Shakespeare. It may be very difficult to get him to prefer reading Hamlet to watching Con-Air. In what has become a hugely famous quote, John Stuart Mill explains how we understand and not understand higher pleasures:

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.”

I think a good way to frame it would be like this. We can accept that there are people who prefer the complete works of Shakespeare and people who prefer the complete box set of Nicolas Cage films - but if you found people that know them both, and asked them whether they would choose to spend the rest of their life in the Lake District with only the complete works of Shakespeare or the complete box set of Nicolas Cage films, the vast majority would choose Shakespeare.

The reason being, of course - it would not be difficult to find out that works of genius like Shakespeare's plays are imbued with possibly unsurpassed deep and enriching qualities that get right to the heart of the psychology of being human, and the important questions of life that we grapple with.

Why is it, then, that in these modern times (particularly) more people seem to gravitate towards the easier and more superficial pleasures over the arguably more rewarding and deeper pleasures? I think there are two main reasons. The first, and probably the lesser of the two reasons, is that people are getting a smidgen of those rewarding and deeper pleasures in their more superficial pleasures - be they books, TV shows, movies or video games.

The second, and I think by far the primary factor, is that when it comes to straightforward simple pleasures that demand little brainwork versus the more complex intellectually satisfying pleasures, humans have a tendency to favour the path of least resistance. Or to put it another way, when faced with the immediate prospect of watching Citizen Kane or Face Off, more people would choose Face Off because, although Citizen Kane may turn out to be ultimately more artistically nourishing, it's a lot easier to relax on the sofa with a beer watching an action movie like Face Off.

Implicit in this is the phenomenon known as hyperbolic discounting - the tendency humans have to prefer current rewards over distant rewards of a higher value. So for example, if I offered you £100 tomorrow or £110 this time year next year you'd probably pick £100 now. But if I offered you £100 on this day in 2017 or £110 the day after in 2017, you'd quite rationally choose the latter. Humans are said to discount the value of the later reward by a factor that increases with the length of the delay.

Psychologist Daniel Read of Warwick Business School and his colleagues have conducted experiments that indicate a connection between hyperbolic discounting and why we are more likely to choose a film like Face Off over a film like Citizen Kane the majority of the time.

 

What Read and his colleagues found was that experimental participants (students, from what I recall), when given the opportunity to select a film like Citizen Kane or Face Off to watch next weekend, were more likely to choose the highbrow film. But when the weekend arrived, they often changed their minds if given the option.

I think hyperbolic discounting has a lot to do with why so many people tread along nicely with the lower pleasures like surfing YouTube for funny videos when ultimately they'd find life more enriching if they pursued the higher pleasures. There is a human habit to suppress those deeper desires for fulfilment whereby what wins through more often than not is the seduction of the low hanging fruit.

For many it would take being stuck on an island or in a log cabin with a choice of lower or higher pleasures before they invested their time in the indulgences of the higher pleasures. But those higher pleasures definitely do exist; even if, prior to the effort of commitment, they can be quite abstruse and arcane.

Some Things You May Not Have Considered About The Process Of Voting

The hideous Trump vs. Clinton contest has probably made more people feel like not voting than in any time in recent American history. The prospect of choosing their President this time around is rather like voting for a four year dose of haemorrhoids or a four year chronic earache. 

If you are someone to whom the above applies (and ditto the British political equivalent), I have one or two things to say. I've written before (here and here) about how in terms of probability your individual vote in an election or a referendum almost certainly won't make the slightest bit of difference to the outcome.

 

A challenger once tried to prove me wrong by posting a link doing the rounds to a low-turnout local election in which a councillor had won a district seat by two voles. What he should have realised is that the fact that an outcome like this is so newsworthy and shared so many times is all the indication one needs that 99.9999% of the time individual votes (or even a few hundred votes) don't make any difference to the outcome.

 

That doesn't necessarily mean I'm advising everyone not to vote - for some people the experience is worthwhile, and it's not for me to tell people how to behave. When it comes to deciding on whether to vote, people should do whatever is valuable to them. But it's always important to remember that value is measured in a whole range of things, and everything is a trade off. If you get x, you get don’t get y.

If you choose y you get less of z, and so on. One is ill-advised to just think of voting as ‘Well everyone should do it!’. Those for whom voting is a beneficial trade off should do it, and those for whom it’s not, should not. As with most things, it’s easy to plug in the numbers and ascertain probability for whether a trade off is beneficial, to yourself and to the wider population.

 

Here's an illustration to show why it probably isn't worth your while voting. Suppose a single vote costs you £3 of your time. In addition you are made an offer – if you care that much about the outcome you can buy as many additional votes as you like for £50 a vote. In other words, if you want to vote 11 times for your local MP or councillor it’s going to cost you £503 (that’s £500 in cash, and £3 in time).

 

Given the astronomically low chance that your additional 10 votes are going to make any difference to the outcome, I would think that most rational minds would agree that in the trade off – negligible chance of securing a candidate vs. not sacrificing £500 – you’d be ill-advised to waste £500, because in all likelihood your £500 of additional votes is likely to mean that the winning margin will be, say, 6031 instead of 6041 (or reverse that if you vote for the winner).

 

It’s pretty obvious to me that if offered additional votes for money, your individual demand curve for increased probability of outcome is pretty flat, and ditto almost the entire population. Therefore, taken to its rational conclusion, and in full knowledge that almost nobody else is going to change their voting habits based on the above wisdom, you’d be wise to take the logic to its farthest conclusion and trade off the vote that costs £3 of your time.

 

A friend replied with the following comment:

 

"I suppose the exception would be in the cases where the difference in the outcome would be so high that it would offset the negligible probability when working out the expected value. In the recent Scottish Independence referendum, 400,000 votes would have altered the outcome. At £50 a vote that would mean £20million would be the cost of a different outcome - so if you thought Scotland being independent would bring more the £20million in value to you then the £50 investment would be worthwhile (not to mention the £3 of time to vote). Admittedly, this exception would only apply to a very small number of people.

 

Also, there's surely an altruistic implication to this. If the £20million of value wasn't something that I saw for myself but for society as a whole (and people on both sides of debates of these kind are throwing around numbers much larger than £20million), then surely that provides a very compelling reason to vote - I am using my time (or in your hypothetical example, money) to produce a greater expected value for society than the cost I have incurred to do so. It seems to me that the smallness of the odds of an individual vote changing the outcome is mitigated by the largeness of the potential payoff of changing the outcome compared to the cost of casting that vote."

 

My friend is partially right - I could conceive of instances in which that’s the case, yes. However, by equal measure, uncertainty of the ramifications of an outcome has to be factored in too, as does the trivial nature of some outcomes.

 

In the case of the latter, in the grand scheme of things it really makes little difference whether the city councillors for Blackpool south wards are Labour councillors or Lib Dem councillors, so even if a millionaire could affect the outcome by buying £50,000 pounds’ worth of votes, I’d argue there are far better ways he could spend the money.

 

In the case of the former, it’s very difficult to know the exact ramifications of a massive decision like Scottish independence or hard and soft Brexits – much of it is contingent on numerous factors not yet apparent, so you could argue that spending millions of pounds affecting the outcome might be a bit of a blindfold in the dark-type of bet.

 

Finally, sometimes in life we find that even big outcomes could be settled in trivial ways, particularly if the democratic process has primacy, as I argued in this blog post about deciding the Scottish referendum by tossing a coin.

 

 

 

Ladies, Strength Not Timidity Is Surely The Answer!

I've written before about how this hyper-sensitive 'generation snowflake' society that is being created is turning our young men and women into liberty-unfriendly, censorious whinge-bots that are thoroughly unprepared for reasoned critical debate and understanding the superlative qualities of free expression for all.

I also pointed out on Facebook the other day the sharp contrast between thin-skinned second rate MPs wanting sexism to be a hate crime, and women on the front line in Syria courageously doing battle with the sanguinary thugs of Islamic State.

It's not for me to tell others how they should fight their battles, but I can, I think, make a couple of suggestions on how all this is being perceived in some quarters, and on whether there may actually be a method of handling these situations that's possibly a teensy weensy bit better.

In a blog a few weeks ago I made a point about how exposed modern day socialists are when they shout in anger about issues in which free market economics has claimed victory long ago. This got me thinking about whether, just possibly, the same might be starting to be true in the UK about women’s liberation. It’s pretty clear that for most of our history men have dominated the landscape and oppressed women in all sorts of horrible ways.

As a consequence, women’s liberation has certainly been a necessary and laudable part of history. But now that brains are the key to a successful career, not brawn, and that from the years up to 40 women are now out-earning men, is it perhaps worth considering that in some cases women’s liberation is beginning to send its artillery into battles that have already been won?

I ask because if the answer is largely yes, then there are probably an awful lot of feminists expending energy in places in which such energy is no longer needed, which, by definition, means they are not expending energy in places where it might well be needed.

I'll leave it to feminists themselves to judge where best to devote time to causes - I shall not presume to know the battles they should pick better than they do. But I'd happily offer a couple of suggestions of battles that need a reappraisal.

First, as alluded to in the link above, a good example of poor use of energy is in a video like this one, with the reliably misinformed feminist Kate Smurthwaite arguing with the reliably well-informed Kate Andrews from the ASI about gender pay, and making a mess of things because she has her facts wrong, and is therefore pursuing something that needs no pursuance.

Second, I think when it comes to women facing negativity in the public arena - insults on Twitter, unpleasant comments on Facebook, or vile abuse at the bottom of the articles they write, the women who are saying the right things on this matter and doing the most for women are the women who absolutely refuse to be timid and self-pitying, and who repudiate the merest suggestion that women require any special treatment in the hostile world of Internet debating (contrast Ella Whelan's response at 7mins 38 compared with the feminists on the their side of the debate in this video clip here).

In my opinion, the women that do the most for the feminist cause are not the masochistic, whinging harpes with whom the word 'feminism' is most readily associated; rather they are the women who influence and inspire simply by doing what they do well - being smart, witty, intelligent, creative and (ideally) kind.

For just as it is one of those ironies that we rarely feel sorry for damaged people who are always moaning and feeling sorry for themselves - it is only when they stop that we actually feel sorry for them - so too it is the case that the women who are always running on about how much they are trying to do to fight the good fight for women are usually the ones doing far less good by imploring others to 'Look at me!', 'Look at me!', 'It's really about me!'.

In my opinion, the real champions of women are not the household name members of the witterati with those children's birthday party magic shows going on in their heads - the likes of, Julie Bindel, Polly Toynbee, Laurie Penny, Jack Monroe, Salma Yaqoob, Zoe Williams, Suzanne Moore, Kate Smurthwaite and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. They are women like Janet Daley, Kate Andrews, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Dia Chakravarty, Gillian Tett, Camilla Cavendish, Claire Fox and Ella Whelan (who competently nails it in this interview on Sky News).

The World's Most Necessary Diet

The problem with the narrative about all the unpaid tax and all the ways the government is not getting the funds it needs to pay for these ever-expanding services is that the real issue is not being addressed - and that is that the State is far too large with far too much economic liability for public services for which it is struggling to pay now, and has no chance of paying in the future.

Unfortunately this short falling perpetuates because the majority of the people are exacerbating the problem by failing to address the size of the State and how it can give itself over to the more efficient and less burdensome private sector.

To make it clear with an analogy, imagine a mother who started feeding her son cheeseburgers at a young age. After a while she started to feed him too many, and eventually he became morbidly obese as he was eating 24 cheeseburgers a day. Her son's eating habits had got out of control, and had become a burden on the household because she could no longer afford to keep him in that many cheeseburgers.

In order to generate the burger funds she tries everything; getting a second job, doing car boot sales at weekends, even begging her friends for a loan whenever she saw them. Alas, the solution in this situation is obvious: far from trying to locate the funds to feed this horrid cheeseburger habit, what the boy's mother needs to do is get her son on a more balanced diet so he can lose weight and live more healthily. It's by helping her son live more healthily that she will at the same time free herself from the economic burden of having to fork out for 24 cheeseburgers per day.

Similarly, by way of analogy regarding its excessive size, in order to save the public sector from its economic obesity we need to stop feeding it cheeseburgers and give it a more balanced private sector diet of market principles, lighter regulation, lower tax burdens and a greatly reduced bureaucracy that's small enough to put our hands around its throat the moment it becomes too aggressive. Consider this every time you want to see more tax paid, heavier regulation, further price controls, quantitative easing and renationalisation - they are like cheeseburgers being fed to an already morbidly obese boy. 

This blog post and analogy comes at a time when earlier in the week I read the latest report from the McKinsey Global Institute, which says that total world debt may well have exceeded $200 trillion by now - the majority of which is not generated by free trade between willing agents, but by politicians hamstringing the financial economy with excessive regulation, price controls, tax legislation, tariffs, and the tens of billions of dollars in employing the bureaucrats that underwrite it all.

Even if there is a slight exaggeration in that figure - and there may well be - it's still a damning indictment, because to understand why so much of this is counterproductive for the economy, you have to understand that when left to its own devices with only very light regulation, the global economy tends towards the principle of parsimony - that is, the law of least effort.

Just as nature's laws find themselves running according to the principle of maximum efficiency, so too would economics if it were left to the principles of economic laws based on prices, supply and demand. You may object that unlike chemical elements, economics involves that complex and erratic phenomenon known as human behaviour, but that's not a valid objection, for as Adam Smith reminds us, the invisible hand acts as a social mechanism that channels collective objectives toward meeting the needs of the people that make up that society, by ensuring competition between buyers and suppliers, which channels the profit motive of individuals into providing products that society desires at prices which are rarely above cost.

Note: What I'm going to finish with is only a rough approximation from my own sparse and scattered data studies in life in general - it is just something for you to ponder - but in terms of the entire global economy, based on what I've been reading in the past ten years or so, the global imbalance between trading in the supply and demand market is probably somewhere between 65% and 75% of the total size of financial transactions in the world. Just to be clear, that 35% to 25% excess doesn't include public sector industry, that is purely the excess created from all the extraneous credits and debits from things like increasing money supplies, price controls, debt interest, and so forth. On the global balance sheet, that amounts to literally trillions of pounds of an imbalance - the vast majority of which is caused by interference in a market that primarily need only rely on the price signals of supply and demand.
   

Two Words That Demonstrate Economic Confusion

Ha-Joon Chang regularly flaunts his economic misunderstandings, and this picture above that has been doing the rounds recently is no exception. There are two words that when uttered in the same sentence are a dead giveaway that the person uttering them is rather confused about economics. Those words are 'trickle' and 'down'. Anyone who understands economics proficiently well wouldn't use the term, let alone complain that money is failing to trickle down.

The term 'trickle down' has been created to be used pejoratively by the hard economic left to take pot shots at society's most successful wealth creators. Here's why no one who understands economics would go on about 'trickle down'. Wealth and value are conterminously linked; value creates wealth and wealth creates value. In other words, to create wealth or value you have to create things that people want or things that benefit people.

Supermarket workers, mechanics, cinema owners, musicians, pub landlords and manufactures of electrical goods all create lots of value for all sorts of people, including many people earning more money than they are. Equally, a CEO of a company creates lots of value for his or her customers (and workers by creating jobs), most of whom are paid lower wages.

The reality is, wealth doesn't just trickle; it drips, pours and gushes, depending on the context - and it doesn't just move downwards - it moves sidewards and upwards as well. Try replacing 'trickle' with 'earned' - that's a much better description of what's happening in a market economy. And please do yourself a favour and stop listening to people like Ha-Joon Chang and Hillary Clinton talking about 'trickle down' economics - it's the grammatical equivalent of saying your when you mean you're and it's when you mean its.

 
What needs to be understood is that the term 'trickle down' would never be uttered by a credible economist, because credible economists know that the trickling fallacy is a garbled label thought up by the left, having no real bearing on how things actually work. In short, if we don't claim it, it's silly to attempt to counterclaim it against us.

The closest we argue about wealth making its way from higher earners to lower earners is in the form of job creation, increased consumption, higher wages and more affordable goods and services.

While we're on the subject, you probably have noticed that arch space cadets Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have a plan - they want to make society more equal by using taxation to take money from those on the highest income and spread it out among the masses. Alas, it's a plan that's long since been proven to be faulty by some seat of the pants mathematics. In 1996 James Mirrlees and William Vickrey were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for proving that top marginal tax rates should be zero, not, as Corbyn and McDonnell think, high and punitive.

Mirrlees’ work figured out formally what other economists had long before realised informally - that a flat tax is the best tax for economic growth (a flat tax for everyone, and at about 20%, not the excessive rates we have today, or much worse, the super excessive rates of governments gone by).

Some politicians think it's counterintuitive to lower taxes to increase income - but it ought to be obvious that if you tax too highly you disincentivise higher earners to earn more money. Mirrlees found that not only is a flat tax rate the most preferable for all of us - he also proved that the marginal tax rate on the very highest earner should be zero.

To see why, suppose the highest earner in the UK earns £1 billion per year and is taxed on those earnings at a flat rate of 20%. A tax rate of zero for any earnings over £1 billion per year would not make the government's tax revenue any worse off - but it might incentivise the highest earner to earn even more money, which makes him and society better off (more jobs, increased consumption, more consumption tax for the government).

Not only is it untrue that you can 'tax your way to prosperity' - it's equally untrue that you can make society better off by excessively taxing the nation's highest earners. Corbyn and McDonnell really need to start learning this basic thing - that the way to engender economic growth and make Britain attractive to outside investors is to tax competitively against other nations' competitive tax rates, not greedily from within a parochial socialist dystopia. 

The Car Insurance Anomaly

An argument I see from time to time from libertarians is that "If it wasn't compulsory, car insurance would be much cheaper, and more competitively arranged, instead of being something the law compels you to purchase".

I think, on this occasion, people who make this claim are under a slight misapprehension. Whether something is a legal compulsion is not the determiner of how cheap it is - what determines prices is competition.

Even though car insurance is mandatory, there is plenty of competition among providers regarding prices. Therefore, as long as no politician looks to impose a price control on the industry, car insurance can operate contemporaneously under a system that legally mandates it, yet allows the competition to keep prices close to their market clearing rate.

Furthermore, something else of interest - from what I recall reading in Freakonomics, car insurance was one of those strange instances of a departure from the norm, whereby, actually, making it non-compulsory in one State (Philadelphia, as I recall) saw prices surge due to non-linear feedback effects.

This also isn't that surprising. To see why, let me explain about feedback effects. The general rule of feedback is that an event becomes part of a feedback loop where a cause and effect chain ends up with situations feeding back into the event. 

You have seen this happen in real situations – for example, when a guitar and speaker produce a sound loop between the audio input and the audio output we hear feedback effects. This is what happens in society too, and here are some examples. 

On the Internet an artist or a weblink can become hugely widespread by a sticking effect. A YouTube video with an unusually high number of hits may create an interest, meaning more hits 'because' of that interest, and this causes a sticking effect, where hits begets more hits, and so on.

For example, suppose 15,000 people happen to view a weblink (this may be a fairly random occurrence), the link may be passed on to an average of 7 people by each one of 80% of the people, meaning that by the second day it has been viewed by 75,000 people. Suddenly you have a lot of people wondering why this link has attracted so much attention - so people look to see what all the fuss is about. 

This then increases the weblink views, which then increase the interest further, which then knocks on to increase the viewing numbers further. In a very short space of time an arbitrary weblink can have huge popularity almost entirely on the basis that this sticking effect has occurred. Most of the views have been because others have been viewing it, and the greater the increase in views the greater the interest, and so on.

Here's another example.  As more people shop online, department stores lose custom. They compensate this loss by putting their prices up, meaning the remaining customers are hit with more expensive products, which means more will change to the cheaper option online, which means that to compensate the department stores hike their prices up even further, causing even more of their customers to choose the online option, and so on.

This same principle explains why, in all probability, if it wasn't compulsory, car insurance would not in actual fact be much cheaper, but probably more expensive. The logic is the same as above. If a US State introduces a policy of non-compulsory car insurance, there will be a reduction in drivers buying car insurance, with the knock on effect being that more drivers have to claim off their own insurance because the person who has hit them has no insurance. 

Because of this, insurance companies increase their premiums, which then prices out more drivers who chose to opt out of insurance buying. This increases the need for insurance companies to increase premiums further, which means more people do not insure their cars. One cause affects the other, and we see back and forth causal factors, leading to a situation like in Philadelphia where car insurance became discordantly high in comparison to the rest of the country.

The Philadelphia car insurance anomaly is a great example of this sticking effect - it has caused unnaturally high car insurance premiums in a place where there is no incommensurably high rate of accidents or car thefts. It is simply a mutually related causal activity where A increases B which then further increases A, and so on until it peaks and gives way to another factor.

On The Nature Of Logic

There was an age old argument from philosophers about the nature of logic. Some philosophers said logic is derived from experience, whereas others said it arises out of our own conceptualising of the world. What should have been obvious, even in the corridors of history, is that what was being presented was a false dichotomy.

A quick consideration of our engagement with reality shows us that humans first have the experience and then we construct the conceptualisations through relational thoughts, of which logic is one. There is no reason why these should be mutually exclusive. To say that those conceptualisations in any way deny the origin of experience is about as misjudged as arguing that the heat of the candle's flame denies the existence of the candle.

Let me tell you about a milestone moment in philosophical history where the matter was settled comprehensively by David Hume. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume posited something that has shocked many, and it has confused numerous laypeople who like flirting with heterodoxy in order to appear subversive or ultra-sceptical, but it remains one of the most important observations in philosophy.

The underlying summary of what Hume gave us is that everything (and I do mean everything) we can classify as knowledge is acquired only through experience of the natural world. We have what Hume called 'matters of fact' which are facts about reality gained from sensory perception that enable us to make propositions about reality out there, and we have 'relations of ideas' which are about formulations of ideation (ideas) and concepts related to those facts.

What Hume's Enquiry laid out better than anyone that preceded him is that we could not possibly have acquired any single bit of human knowledge without experience, and as a consequence we never predict anything that is not already presented to us through some experiential pathway.

Of course, we can elaborate on previously discovered things, and we can make forecasts ("Africa will be more prosperous in 300 years' time" is a forecast, as is "Any two objects in nature attract each other with a force according to an inverse square law", albeit a different kind of forecast) - but we can never predict anything previously undiscovered about nature herself (for further detail of this, this Blog post - Why We Never Have, & Never Will, Predict Anything New)

The key thing here is that we build on experiences through those 'relations of ideas' which involves extrapolating from the data of experience and building concepts, ideas and views about our sensory experiences of the natural world, but every bit of new knowledge is a discovery, because everything new comes from experience.

So the same applies to logic then?

Yes, it is by this method that we deal with logic too. Logic amounts to human extrapolations from our engagement with physical reality - it is a formal construct derived from experience of how the world is. So we can say that all our empirical knowledge is built on logic, but equally our logic is derived from our experiences of the world. I don't mean, of course, that logic gives us new information about the world - I mean that it provides us with a system that reflects how the world works. 

Logic works like this; If, for a deductive argument, the form of the syntax is valid ("If P then Q; P, then Q") then all we need to do insert some rationally consistent and factual premises in place of P and Q , and we can arrive at a true conclusion. If the argument form (the syntax) is valid and the semantic components (the premises) are true, then the argument is sound.

Here's a simple explanation of deduction and induction. When looking at an argument, two things are considered - whether it is valid and whether it is sound.  An argument is valid when the conclusion logically follows from the premises.

All politicians wear glasses

Bill is a politician
Therefore Bill wears glasses

That is a valid argument, because if all politicians wear glasses, and Bill is a politician, it logically entails that Bill wears glasses. But while it is a valid argument, it is not a sound argument. A valid argument becomes sound when the conclusion logically follows from the premises, provided the premises are true. Clearly the above argument is not sound because the first premise is wrong (all politicians do not wear glasses). For an argument to be deductive, it must be valid as well as having premises that are known to be true. Here's an obvious one:

All men are mortal.

Bill is a man.
Therefore, Bill is mortal.

As you can see, all arguments and observations rest on there being a logical underpinning to the proceedings. Let's take a well known principle to show how inextricably linked to the physical logic is - the law of non-contradiction. Since the days of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle many people have been employing the correspondence theories of truth, which states that how we deal with the formulation of truth is to do with our perception of the relationships between our inner thoughts and the external reality with which we interface.

The tools of logic apply so well to our world because they are based on how the physical world works - and the law of non-contradiction is a prime example. The law of non-contradiction takes the form “A is not not-A”, which basically means that one cannot logically predicate of a thing a quality which is its contradictory. 

In other words, something cannot be A and not A at the same time, and our brains literally can’t conceive of reality any other way. Close your eyes for a second and try to imagine a triangle that is also a circle, or a woman who has short ginger hair and long black hair. Why did you find that impossible to conceive? Because it would require us to simultaneously have the physical constituents of the thought A and not A at the same place at the same time - something which is physically impossible, because nature permits that it is not possible.

If by our understanding of perception of colour a woman has entirely short ginger hair she cannot simultaneously have entirely long blond hair. Our ideas of mutual contradiction are based on our experiences and on associative ideas. Try to picture a head of hair that is fully ginger and fully black at the same time and you'll find you won't be able to. Picture a head that is a mixture of ginger and black and the world makes sense again.

The law of non-contradiction has to be self-evidently valid, because any attempt to disprove it assumes its efficacy and proves the thing you're trying to disprove. To propose it is false is to presuppose that it is not at the same time true, and to propose it is true is to presuppose it is not at the same time false. Ergo: the law of non-contradiction is valid - to attempt to refute it only confirms it.

Given the foregoing, it should be clear that we derive our understanding of logic from how things are in nature. We don't choose to invent the law of non-contradiction, we find that it holds because of the way nature is. The same is true of the truth conditions of a proposition. Even though we derive logic from experience and form those conceptualisations as a consequence, we still require an inner criterion for making such judgements. 

Think of it as being a bit like the rules for chess or grammar - there isn't anything wrong with them within the confines of their constituent parts, because they serve the purpose of acting as a supporting strap for the players. Similarly, the language of logic is a human construct that provides a supporting strap for the players involved in engaging with the world and how it works.

We know that logic requires experience because no one has ever been able to convey a logical truth that can be understood without invoking some example abstracted from the world of experience. In actual fact, the logic part is relatively straightforward compared with the subjects it contains.

The logical rule "If P then Q, not P then not Q" is easy to understand. If a man is married then he is not a bachelor. John is married, therefore John is not a bachelor. But experience might tell us something more complex while still obeying the logical principles. If it is raining then the roads are wet, it is not raining, therefore the roads are not wet. I can conceive of situations in which the road is wet while it is not raining.

A lorry containing a tanker of water could crash and spill its load all over the road. Moreover, I have known roads to still be wet long after it has stopped raining. The reason I need experience to demonstrate this is because logic gives no indication of causation – only experience presents us with causation. Logic can tell me that John cannot be a bachelor and not a bachelor at the same time, but only experience can tell me when John gets married. 

Not only is logic derived from experience – it is the structure of interpretation that underpins almost all of our enquiries. Without logic, our attempts at knowledge would fall down. That’s why we couldn’t come up with a different system of logic that we could use to govern our epistemology – because we have grafted on to our thinking a system that provides us with rules for attaining knowledge, but also because the attainment of knowledge is built around having formal structures that provide us with consistency to attain knowledge.

Logic is like the ground on which our objects of knowledge can be placed. It also acts as a set of formal tokens which is then employed as a vehicle that reflects external reality. That is why I think it is accurate to say that logic is a true reflection of what is found in nature. Unlike mathematics, logic doesn’t have truths outside of a universe, because every form of logic with which we interface is based on facts about our universe. Logic is to the universe as paint is to the canvas.

Truly Bizarre, This: How To Get It & Yet Totally Not Get It At The Same Time

Hmm, this is a strange one! It's not uncommon to see an article in the Telegraph that's along the right lines; and it's not uncommon to see an article in the Telegraph that's a ball of confusion.

It is, however, fairly uncommon to see an article in which the writer is confused in one paragraph, then in the next paragraph comes up with the answer that explains his confusion, but then goes back to being just as confused as when he started.

His grievance is that:

"Kitchen blenders used to be made in the UK, but now no blenders are made here. All of them, every single one, is imported from abroad, mostly from China. What has gone wrong?"

Err... nothing has gone wrong; this is the nature of trade, and what makes two countries progress simultaneously by mutually beneficial transactions. If China has the comparative advantage in x, y or z, then the purpose of beneficial trade is that we buy x, y or z from China, not the other way round. Our writer doesn't seem totally unfamiliar with this principle:

"This is indeed a sad state of affairs. Kitchen blenders are relatively simple to manufacture. Until the late 1980s Kenwood made its iconic blenders in the UK, before moving its operations to China. But why don’t we still make them? The production processes involved – tool setting, machine minding, assembly, testing and packing – can mostly be learned by a workforce in a couple of days.

You don’t need much management experience to run these kinds of operations; to order the right components, ensure the correct specification and quality standards, to keep waste to a minimum, and to make sure that costs are kept under control.

Making kitchen blenders is not rocket science. So why are none of them produced in the UK today? There is a simple reason: the cost base in the UK is too high. Essentially, it costs far more to produce them here than it does in the Far East. As a result, not only kitchen blenders but thousands of other medium and low-tech products, which could perfectly well be manufactured in the UK, are all imported from abroad, mostly from the Far East."

Ahem, yes - couldn't have explained it better myself - it's because we can get these goods cheaper from abroad that it would be more expensive for Brits to buy them as home grown products rather than as imported goods. It's truly bizarre that the writer appears to get the basics of this so well, yet so abjectly fails to grasp why lamenting the lack of UK kitchen blender manufacturing is so foolishly short-sighted.

Aston La Vista, Baby!

Have a look at this picture above, and see if you can guess what type of car this is. Believe it or not it's actually an Aston Martin. It hasn't sold at all well, because there wasn't much market demand for it (it sold fewer than 150 in two years).

So demand for this ugly duckling of a car was low, but the story goes deeper, because the reason Aston Martin put it on the market in the first place was nothing to do with demand - it was due to an EU directive that said all European car companies must adhere to a law which sees CO2 emission averaging 130g/km across the range of cars produced by the company.

So alongside the seat of the pants V8s (that do sell well), Aston Martin had to produce these tosserati mobiles (that didn't sell well) in order to get the average emissions down across their supplies. It's just one of many examples of the market demand being crassly distorted by EU regulations.

Brexit glee anyone?

Can't Unite, Won't Unite, Shouldn't Unite

Encouraged by their leader today, Corbynites are peddling the narrative that now Mr C has won again, and with an even bigger majority than last time, the party must unite and get behind their leader in order to attempt to form an effective opposition to the Tories.

I think this is highly unlikely to happen, and nor should anyone actually want it to happen. The Labour Party is made up of a variety of politicians – some on the hard left, some centre left, and many in between – and whether you share their views or not, they are views that are fervently held and that form the basis of their beliefs and goals.

Except by some shadowy pretence, many Labour MPs can’t, and shouldn’t, claim to be behind a shadow cabinet and a set of policies they are not. Divisions of this magnitude exist for a reason, and they cannot ‘unite’ in their goals any more than a vegetarian and a meat eater can unite to share a chicken and bacon pizza.

The group that has taken the party this far to the left has created an irreconcilable impasse that won’t be resolved by everyone in the party pretending to be of the same voice. Given that the members have effectively taken the party hostage, and have made it very difficult for any non-Corbynite to secure enough votes to be the next leader after Corbyn, it seems to me that the non-Corbynites have three realistic options:

1) Look to split the party.

2) Mince around for probably two more election catastrophes until even the Corbynites get fed up with embarrassing losses and realise that the electorate won’t vote for a hardline socialist, and then put forward a more electable candidate.

3) Somehow try to get hundreds of thousands of new anti-Corbyn members to pay up and join in order to outnumber the Corbynites and swing the party back to being electable again.

Almost everyone involved won’t fancy 1 or 2 very much, so it seems to me the only recourse is to look for a few hundred thousand people to sign up and add numbers to the anti-Corbyn side of the vote.

What's Behind The Labour Curtain?

In changing the rules to allow paying members to vote for the party leader, Ed Miliband couldn't have predicted what a 5 season, 25 disc box set of political drama he's gifted the nation. As someone who was thoroughly bored with second rate politicians arguing over the centre ground like teenagers squabbling over which one of them has the best mobile phone, Ed Miliband, in allowing thousands of dormant socialists to have a voice and change the direction of their party, has unintentionally made things interesting again.

However, entertaining as that may be, the party is in big trouble, with the majority of its MPs currently forced to choose between a revolt or supporting a man in whom they have no conviction. It is the fact that thousands can effectively bring the party to its knees just by paying to join what is probably a fairly transient Marxist version of Thomas Carlyle's Great Man phenomenon, being played out with a cult of personality fad, that makes things alarmingly problematic for those affiliated with Labour, and hugely entertaining for those that are not.

For me, the significant thing that Owen Smith's leadership loss today tells us about the current Labour Party is that Labour is biding its time as a party. Didn't you wonder why Labour has been holding back its better guns and putting forward the dreadful Owen Smith as the best candidate to challenge Corbyn? I mean let me be clear, I'm obviously no supporter of any of the Labour party MPs. But even I can see that in the context of being a credible (or less un-credible) leader there are MPs like Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, and Alan Johnson who, unlike Owen Smith, are not thought of as being a complete duffer by 99% of people in the country.

It was crystal clear that Owen Smith was not the best they had to offer, so why didn't the Labour Party put forward a less un-credible candidate than Owen Smith? It seems evident to me that it's because they have conceded short-term defeat and have their eyes on the future not the present. Given the size of the pro-Corbyn membership, no challenger stands a chance with the current rules, so the better MPs are probably biding their time until Corbyn presumably stands down after the 2020 election defeat.

Which leads me to my last point. In my view, there is only one current Labour MP that would have a sniff of a chance of being a Labour Party Prime Minister - and that person is Chuka Ummuna. He's young, black, good looking, reasonably likeable, has views that are closer than most in the party to being a weighted average of people who either would or might vote for Labour, and is marginally less terrible than the others. At 25/1 with the bookies, he looks to me a good bet to be the next Labour leader in 2020 after Labour loses the General Election and Corbyn stands down.

Two Fallacious Memes Doing The Rounds

If you're Facebook friends with people who share memes that are superficially seductive but logically and evidentially dubious, the chances are you've seen two that are doing the rounds (again!!) with some ubiquity this week - one is encouraging people to buy from small local businesses, and the other is to force supermarkets to donate leftover food. .

On the first - Oh dear! What a completely inaccurate and misjudged message on that sign! There's nothing wrong with voluntarily paying that little bit extra to support local shops - particularly when the products are better and there's a community relationship.

 

But if I saw a sign like that, I'd be more inclined to not give them my custom, because the message they are trying to convey is a load of tosh!

 

The reality: when you buy from a big business you also help a little girl get her dance lessons, a little boy get his jersey, and a mum and dad put food on the table - many many little girls, boys and mums and dads, in fact.

 

When you buy from the likes of Sainsbury's, Tesco, McDonald's, Burger King, etc you help support the living of thousands of cashiers, shelf-stackers, fast-food workers, drivers, machine manufacturers, and by extension countless other businesses too numerous to mention.

 

Furthermore, when you add up the net benefits to families in terms of extra money in their pockets due to supermarket price wars - which I read in Forbes a few weeks ago to be nigh-on £11 billion pounds - it really does expose the short-sightedness of this particular 'local' shop. 

On the second - Now I've no doubt that this mass response has good intentions at its heart - after all, when there is the square peg of unused food in supermarkets and the square hole of a lot of hungry people in our country that cannot afford their weekly meals, nobody wants to think of wasted food and desperate people missing out.

 

But as is usually the case, the intentions may be noble, but there are potential problems that the noble intentions fail to capture, as I blogged about here.

 

 

 

IEA Paper: How Governments Harm Trade

The following paper, published here with the Institute of Economic Affairs, and entitled How Governments Harm Trade (for the full version, see link at the bottom), is a paper in which I explain the principle behind why in most cases the free market works best when governments do not interfere in the prices society engenders by the laws of supply and demand. Those prices, I will argue, reflect human choices played out on a day to day basis, and are the soundest bottom-up basis on which economies are organised, not the top-down organisations that politicians impose on us.

I will show how value is created in every societal transaction for both agents by the combination of consumer surplus and producer surplus. As this paper will also show, the main regulations one ought to be opposed to are ones that artificially interfere with prices and the information-carrying signals they exhibit.

On the issue of when it is good or bad for the state to be involved in the free market, I use quite a simple and obvious formula. It is this: the state should only involve itself in our transactions when there is a net benefit to society from this involvement. That is, when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.

When stated like that, I would think it is hard to find a sane person who disagrees with that proposition. The odd thing about society, however, is that it is full of people who would find little trouble agreeing with the idea in its above propositional form, but who quite comfortably hold numerous beliefs that depart from the above logic. It is this societal anomaly that will be unpacked.

To read the full paper click here

The Economist Doesn't Do A Very Good Job With This One

From the days when I used to read it every week (long before the days of the online option) The Economist has always come across as wishing to be economically slightly right of centre and socially slightly left of centre. My impression these days from sporadic reading is that in terms of its economics it is drifting implacably to the left, probably to appeal to a younger readership.

It is still friendly to free trade, but in my view not trenchant enough in its repudiation of bad leftist policies. A good example is this article, which despite being two years old, grabbed my attention this morning when it was shared on The Economist's Facebook page and generated lots of attention in the comments section.

It's not just that the article sits on the fence too much regarding the minimum wage, it's more that by only focusing on how the policy affects statistical employment levels in terms of having only a moderate effect on job losses, it fails to consider the most important statistical group - the people that cannot get a foot on the rung of the employment ladder in the first place (and that's to say nothing of the other negative effects such as unfairly loading the burden onto employers of low-skilled workers and causing price inflations that hit those same people hardest).

An article that makes itself so oblivious to the entirety of the net cost on society is rather like an article on assisted suicide that makes no mention of the pain and suffering of the people that wish to end their life. The minimum wage is basically a tax on people who do the most for low earners - a tax passed on to low-earning consumers, which ought to tell you almost everything you need to know about it (and let's not forget that it has a very dark history with sinister eugenicists who knew exactly what kind of effect it would have on struggling factions of society, as I wrote about in this article for the Adam Smith Institute) .

The minimum wage legislation occurs because the UK government wants low-skilled workers to receive more in wages than the market value of their labour - but it rather reminds us of an old political maxim: don't judge a policy by its intentions.

The desire to ensure low earners have enough to make ends meet is a noble one - but it can, and should be achieved by supplementary benefits, which basically amount to a tax funded by taxpayers as a whole, rather than the minimum wage, which is a tax on people who employ low-skilled workers, where the cost is largely borne by consumers of firms that employ lots of low-skilled workers.

It should be obvious, but as I explained in this blog, if you want to help low-earners it seems bizarre and unnaturally wrong to expect the vast majority of the cost to fall on the sub-section of society already doling the most for low-skilled workers and for consumers who buy the goods and services provided by low-skilled workers.

Like the ill-conceived tariffs I mentioned in a recent blog post, the minimum wage benefits are tangible and easy to endorse, whereas the costs are spread out widely across the population (particularly for people whose labour value falls below the government's mandated price floor and remain unable to sell their labour). Like the tariffs, politicians like minimum wage legislations because they conceal the subtlety of the tax*.

In the past few decades government spending has hovered around the 40% mark of the entire GDP, which constitutes a massive proportion of total spending. Plus if you add on all the hidden taxes in the form of regulations, price controls, tariffs, etc - plus government borrowing, which is basically deferred taxation (which this graph does not factor in), it's probably over 60% of GDP.

That is to say, if the government taxes Jack 20p in every £1 earned and gives some of it to Jill, that transaction is recorded as a tax. If however, the government forces Jack to pay Jill more than her market value, or consume at a price above the market value, those transactions between state and citizen won't be recorded as a tax

Just as the tariffs prevent you from buying cheaper alternative goods and services from more competitive foreigners, the minimum wage prevents you from buying cheaper alternative goods and services domestically. Not only do both these regulations generate many deadweight losses on the economy, they are deadweight losses for which the majority of our citizens continually lobby the government.

Alas, I'm sorry to say - almost all our society is controlled and governed around left wing constructs (progressive taxation, price controls, state-provided health, education, defence, a quasi-governmental central bank that controls interest rates, and it's impossible to undertake any mutually beneficial transaction with another agent without incurring numerous instances of State-regulation or state-enforced taxation on earnings that have already been taxed - usually both).

* To give you an additional point to consider regarding the absurdity of this price floor; suppose our new chancellor Philip Hammond was injected with a potion that made him believe all old banger cars in circulation have suddenly increased in value. 

From now on, irrespective of whether your car is falling to bits, rusty, leaking, worn out or on its last legs, under this new potion’s influence the Chancellor now believes that no car is worth less than £1500. On the basis of this, he creates a minimum car sale law that prohibits anyone from selling a car for under £1500.

Who do you think this will hurt most? You've got it, the people trying to sell inexpensive cars. Philip Hammond's law won't make those cheap cars any more valuable to buyers than they already are - which means the law will simply prohibit a lot of people from being able to buy and sell cheap cars. The same reasoning can be applied to minimum wage laws.

 

Not Everything Has To Be Pareto Optimal

A reader asked whether in economics we should always strive for Pareto improvements. For those unfamiliar with the term, a Pareto improvement is any action that makes at least one person better off and makes nobody worse off. That is not the same as saying that society enjoys a net benefit, because that can happen while still seeing some people being made worse off.

A new village pub could make 90% of the villagers better off while still making 10% of them worse off. The only way to turn that into a Pareto improvement would be to compensate the 10%. Besides, Pareto optimality isn't much of a measure of a society anyway - a society can have numerous Pareto efficiencies and still be a pretty fraught place to live.

Pareto efficiencies are relatively rare in society because life is a series of trade offs, and it is difficult to do anything in society without making someone else worse off. The prospect of people feeling like they've been made worse off often leads to a stalemate.

For example, suppose your 23 year old son Jack is performing his first piano concert at the local school hall, but you and your wife get a one-off offer of a holiday to stay in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park courtesy of your best friends Jim and Sue who've won a New York holiday for four in a competition.

The holiday clashes with the piano concert - and what usually would happen is that someone is going to be disappointed, and it must be weighed up with the question of who should be the one disappointed? Personally I think the son should be disappointed.

When there is a stalemate, the economists Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks came up with a watered down version of the Pareto criterion, called the Kaldor–Hicks criterion, which is a measure of economic efficiency that runs alongside the Pareto-efficiency, but makes less of a demand on the outcome. The Kaldor-Hicks criterion states that a decision can be seen as efficient as long as in theory everyone can be compensated to offset any potential costs.

So in the above case, Jack's parents are made better off by the holiday, whereas Jack is made worse off because his parents won't be there for his big concert performance, so they would need to find significant financial restitution or compensatory action to make things beneficial for all concerned. As long as this can be done in theory, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is satisfied - and this is a good basis on which to assess cost-benefit analyses.