On Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, Supply & Demand, Feminism & A Quote To Die For!!

The Harvey Weinsteins of this world may be grubby sexual opportunists, but the people calling for his head on a platter need to understand the landscape on which the likes of Harvey Weinstein operate. Not that that's any excuse for his behaviour (obviously!!) - but it does have a context, and it's a context that the people that become his victims help facilitate.

The way I usually summarise these situations is like this: When demand astronomically outweighs supply in a winner takes all market, the ground is fertile for manipulation and coercion. And that's what we are seeing here.

When consumers wanted to fill their tanks during the petrol crisis, some garages took advantage with higher prices, ditto water sellers after hurricanes hit America. When there is exceedingly high demand in a situation with very limited supply, the suppliers can have excessive power over the consumer, because power lies in the hands of those with a scarce resource in high demand.

Take any institution in which wannabe celebrities court fame - Hollywood, The X Factor, even the BBC -  and you will find my formula (demand astronomically outweighs supply in a winner takes all market) is highly prominent. Supply and demand are in extreme disequilibrium on Hollywood's yellow brick road, which means the power is skewed in favour of people like Harvey Weinstein, and heavily skewed against people wishing to carve out a career in Hollywood, and who may make themselves vulnerable if they think it will give them a leg up (pun intended).

Aspiring stars in a winner takes all market already have to fight hard to get on the ladder to stardom: usually their career begins with long hours, low pay, fringe roles and susceptibility to manipulation and coercion that wouldn't occur to anything like the same extent in other industries.

Just like how readers have to take a smidgen of responsibility for what the gutter press releases in its newspapers, would-be celebrities should be mindful that obsessive courting of wealth and fame makes them susceptible to the thrall of powerful people who will capitalise on those hopes and dreams (this does not exculpate the perpetrators {obviously!!}, but it's true that some crimes have a wider context that should be explored*).

What about the #MeToo gesture?

Here's the thing. On October 17th I made a prediction - I warned that genuine sufferers of abuse may end up being washed into similitude by floods of socially-conformist #MeToo gestures - and that is precisely what happened, I'm sorry to say.

But naturally, that isn't all that has happened - and despite some inevitable protestations to the contrary, I never said otherwise (again, obviously!! Who would?) The positive side of #MeToo is that it hopefully helped a lot of women who've been abused - to be reached out to by friends and family that otherwise might not have known, and to be supported in issues they may now feel more comfortable confronting.

Yet, alas, it also created a platform for the misandrous wing of feminism to spew out some pretty unpleasant things - and that is what I also warned against - that scores of socially awkward and intellectually inept women would take to their keyboards to paint a far too bleak picture of men, and hard-sell a worldview of women as being little more than pathetic victims in a harsh, patriarchal watered down version of The Handmaid's Tale.

To me, and I'm pleased to say, to quite a few women I know who are with me on this (pugnacious feminism is, thankfully, a minority level phenomenon), this radically departs from the well-worn wisdom that the best way to achieve progress for women and men is to be conjoined in striving for progress for both sexes, not in pitting one sex against the other in completely erroneous pursuits (like this one).

There are loads of examples I could pick, but as a couple of Facebook friends shared it, let's go with this one by a feminist called Jeni Harvey who writes a charming little piece in which she refers to people who don't agree with her as 'pus gatherers'. She divides these 'pus gatherers' into three categories, with each of her categories being as myopic as it is charmless:

1) First is blanket denial, whereby men and their cheerleaders deny that sexual abuse on such a massive scale exists at all. Women are fanciful, lying, exaggerating for effect. There is a bandwagon onto which women are joyfully leaping in an attempt to malign men and revel in their perceived victimhood.

Er…yes, damn right - we are denying that in the UK sexual abuse exists on a massive scale. It does not. Several things are getting erroneously conflated here. Of course we are all too painfully aware that every instance of sexual abuse is one instance too much - and we will always fight against it (I've done so myself in the past), but the vast majority of men are not sexual abusers, and it's a lie to say otherwise.

And on the second point, again, yes, damn right, there is a bandwagon onto which some women are joyfully leaping in an attempt to malign men and revel in their perceived victimhood. Once again, if Jeni Harvey is oblivious to this, she is ultra-selective in how she views reality.

2) Second, we have the more modern form of denial which concedes that yes, sexual abuse is a common problem, although not a gendered one. There are simply some people that abuse other people and all abuse is equally bad. The inconvenient and statistical truth that 98% of all sexual crime is committed by men, and that the overwhelming majority of their victims are female, can be pasted over with obfuscation and the politics of individualism.

This still skews the reality somewhat, and misses the point in doing so. Even if 98% of all sexual crime is committed by men, and even if the overwhelming majority of their victims are female, this still compromises a relatively small proportion of the population. Again, that doesn't trivialise all the dreadful instances of abuse that do go on, but to pretend this is a problem that indicts most men is a lie.

Moreover, even if we move away from sexual abuse onto other things that social justice warriors like to bemoan - like sexism and racism - you'll find this is greatly exaggerated.

If racism is accurately defined as:

"Unfair and unkind prejudice against someone based only on ethnicity or skin colour"

And if sexism is accurately defined as:

"Unfair and unkind prejudice against someone based only on their sex"

Then there is very little racism or sexism in the UK. Almost all prejudices (both fair and rational, and unfair and irrational) are not intrinsically about sex or ethnicity, they are about the distal factors associated with those things. I think despite all the bellowing out there, it is fairly obvious that actual racism and sexism is very miniscule in the UK.

By the way, don't be tempted to lump Internet abuse into neatly demarcated categories like sexism and racism, even when it looks very much like that is what it is. Most Internet abuse is driven from another place - a place of immature anonymity which takes the personhood out of communication. Face to face, most of these online trolls wouldn't act like as they do - social media is a mask behind which many insecure people spew out their bile because, like the experiments of Millgram and Zimbardo, they can do so under a different, morally less-culpable, persona.

3) Lastly, we have the outraged hyperbole. The shock! The fury! Whoever could have imagined such horrifying evil existed in the world?!

Oh do stop it! Look, those men that abuse women are awful, but most men would stand right behind you in a direct challenge to abuse. Men in general have done so much for women (and women for men) - men have gone to war to defend the household and toiled and sweated in hard industry to provide for their families. They do not deserve this level of misandry - and if the signposts were reversed, women would rightly be calling out misogyny.

"Do they seek to ameliorate or weaponise suffering? If it's the latter, they're fakes"

Paula Wright

Melting socialist snowflakes

One final point and I'm done. It's no coincidence that most of the belligerent feminists that feed off female insecurity are also statist socialists who rather resemble conspiracy theorists in their distrust of markets, competition and the individual ability to act according to liberty and the free exchange of opinions and ideas.  

And I'm afraid that this is the triune responsibility of their parents, the education system and the media - all of which play their part in leaving young people thoroughly ill-equipped to deal with the society into which they will grow. Many are corralled inside a gilded cage of paranoia, and are imbued with a spirit that gravitationally pulls them towards safe spaces and an inability to encounter views and opinions that radically depart from their own.

This gets sold as society being more tolerant, sensitive and understanding - but if only that were true - it is a small subsection of society being selectively tolerant, sensitive and understanding towards views they agree with, and radically intolerant and dismissive of contra-opinions and afraid to have their ideas challenged. They are putting up walls for wallflowers, and this is a sure-fire route to an exaggerated perceived victimhood that convinces itself to look for offence, unfairness and injustice when it isn't there.

An analogy for the harm it does - when a child falls over and grazes their knee, if a parent fusses with 'Oh diddums' they will start to become cry babies every time they fall over. If a parent says 'Now come on, up you get, it's only a fall' they will habitually start to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and move along. 

The biggest amnesia from which the young need to be rescued is the one whereby they have forgotten that it's the free exchange of opinions and ideas that breeds the highest levels of tolerance, progression and clarity of facts and truths.  

I am going to close with an awesome statement I read the other day from someone called Kristina Blount Guyban. I don't mind admitting it brought the vapour of a tear to my eye:

"We will not sit back and watch our husbands and sons be disrespected by women who don't know them because they are men.

We will not sit back and watch our husbands and sons be lumped into the same category as disgusting and depraved men.

We will not sit back and allow the world to become a place that is hostile to our growing sons just because they are men.

We will not allow our husbands' masculinity and manhood be dragged through the mud because some women think all men are worthless.

We will not sit back and watch our hard working husbands sacrifice blood sweat and tears for our families only to have their earnings taxed to pay for things that are against their values.

We will not sit back and watch the legacies our husbands are building be torn down. This is our proclamation: some say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, we say hell hath no fury like a woman defending her husband.

We're not here to oppress you. We are here to defend our men. Don't underestimate us. We are smart, we are brave."

Kristina Blount Guyban

Amen! And I reciprocate that wholeheartedly to all women out there, and, of course, men too!!

 * We've been here before with feminists getting the wrong end of the stick about an argument - Arguing With Feminists About Rape

Further reading -- A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Cheap Fame

On Giving To Beggars

The New Statesman has a provocative article out, entitled Why you should give money directly and unconditionally to homeless people - educating us about how to treat the homeless:

"Give your cash directly and unconditionally to homeless people. Don’t just buy them a sandwich from Pret. They’re not four. They have the right to spend their money as they choose – and it is their money, once given. Don’t just give to people performing, singing, or accompanied by a cute dog. Buskers deserve a wage too, of course. But homeless people are not your dancing monkey and they shouldn’t have to perform to earn your pity."

The attitude of the article writer is laudable - for of course we should treat homeless people with the utmost respect. But I have serious doubts about the reasoning - I think if, ultimately, you really want to help homeless people, suggesting we give directly to them is the opposite of good advice.

We all know that if there are concerns about giving a beggar some money because he might spend it on drink and drugs, it is easy to buy him food instead. But even that doesn't go far enough - I'm not sure that giving them anything is helping them in the long run - if you want to help the homeless it is probably better to offer a financial contribution to the agency set up to help them than it is giving them things directly.

In the long run, if giving to beggars creates a culture in which beggars know they can get money on the streets from passers by, it will only incentivise more begging. If prospective beggars can earn three or four thousand pounds a year with few opportunity costs from taking up begging, then they may well invest a lot of their time taking up begging.

Conversely, if beggars could earn only a few pounds a year from begging, they would be less inclined to spend time begging. It's almost trivially obvious: suppose God flicks a switch and, starting tomorrow, nobody in the world has even the slightest inclination to give to beggars - and beggars become aware of this transformation - how many beggars do you think there will be this next year? The answer is zero.

Alas, the problem with my optimal solution of giving to help the homeless charities rather than giving to beggars is unless it is a collective effort undertaken by everyone, it will not be enough to bring an end to street begging. That is, it will not drastically reduce the supply of givers, so it will not diminish the incentive for begging.

That being the case, to whom should you give your money on the streets? Well first you have to remember that not all struggling people on the streets are beggars, and not all beggars are struggling people - some are opportunists making cash out of people's beneficence - they don't need the money as much as other beggars.

Generally, it's pretty safe to assume that the elasticity of sleeping rough with regard to receiving financial help from passers by is probably close to zero. That is to say, the people that need our help most in terms of direct donations are the people least likely to be on the streets in the hope of expecting to receive donations - they will be on the streets whether or not they receive donations, and are probably the ones for whom we should buy food.

My advice in buying food for people on the streets is not to give them the food and walk away - it is to sit with them and talk. I have spent lots of time in life talking to people on the streets after I've bought them some food. They are frequently interesting, edifying often eye-opening conversations - but then, why wouldn't they be? - homeless people are as human as the rest of us.

Debates About Abortion Are More Than Just About Morality

There has been a lot in the news recently about the subject of abortion. Jacob-Rees-Mogg, perhaps the smartest MP in the House of Commons, received widespread criticism for his belief that abortion is always wrong under any circumstances. And last week there was a documentary on BBC 2 called Abortion on Trial in which Anne Robinson hosted a debate between nine people who held different, sometimes highly contentious, views on abortion.

Debates on abortion are seen by most to be disagreements on moral grounds, but that isn't primarily what's behind the divergences. The differences of opinion on abortion are not primarily to do with moral issues; they are to do with interpretation of facts.

They may consist of moral convictions, but moral convictions are based on evidence-based understandings of how certain acts affect human beings, which are about matters of fact and interpretation of data. Take our anti-abortion Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Mrs. Jones the pro-abortion lobbyist - what they disagree on is not so much about moral issues (not in most cases) it is a difference of opinion about facts.

Jacob Rees-Mogg believes all human life is sacred and should not be killed. Hence, he claims to believe that killing a foetus is morally equivalent (or thereabouts) to committing murder. Although she is pro-abortion, Mrs. Jones still believes that murder is wrong - it's just that she doesn't think abortion is murder. If Mrs. Jones believed that killing a foetus is morally equivalent to murder, then she would be anti-abortion too. That's why their primary difference is not a difference in morality - both of them are anti-murder - it's a difference of opinion about what constitutes murder.

But the matter doesn't stop there. In terms of epistemological consideration of abortion, there are four kinds of women:

1) Those that think abortion is not murder and would terminate a foetus

2) Those that think abortion is murder and have no qualms about terminating a foetus
3) Those that think abortion is not murder and would not terminate a foetus
4) Those that think abortion is murder and would therefore not terminate a foetus

People in group 1 will usually feel able to have an abortion and not feel like they have committed murder. People in group 2 that have an abortion are effectively doing so in spite of thinking it is murder, so they are far lower in numbers than those in group 1. People in group 3 may not think abortion is murder but they may think life is sacred and wish to preserve and protect it. People in group 4 usually would not have an abortion, and may often protest against others having abortions too.

When pro-choice people call for more tolerance, they are underestimating the strength of the opposition's belief. Tolerance is the capacity to recognise and respect the beliefs or practices of others - and of course one can do that even towards those one thinks are absurdly misjudged. I think scientology is a foolish, manipulative belief system, but in being tolerant of it, I'm saying that if you want to believe in something that I think is utter rubbish then that's up to you.

It is prohibitively difficult to call for tolerance in the abortion debate, because what remains ambiguous is the very qualification for tolerance in the first place. There is no use crying out for tolerance unless there is some agreement about what should be tolerated. Given that the two sides disagree on the definition of murder, it is unlikely that appeals for tolerance can be easily used for reconciliation.

Let's now look at the epistemological considerations regarding where people diverge on the abortion matter. If the abortion debate is primarily about whether or not abortion is murder, we have to take the problem a step back, because even if we all agreed that aborting a human life is murder, and that murder is wrong, there would still be the question of at what point does it take effect?

Just as views about whether divorce is right or wrong depend on how seriously one views marriage; views on abortion depend not just on whether it is murder, but also on whether one views a foetus as a human or a pre-human, and on whether murder can occur at the pre-human level.

There is also the little matter of what is life?

People consumed by this debate need to give a bit more consideration to the intricacies of gestation, because what goes on internally is not a simple mythological moment of conception – and that needs to be factored into this idea of denying potential human life. 

If we decide to classify ‘life’ at an exact point, we still have time over which to deliberate. The egg is responsible for 23 of the zygote's chromosomes and the spermatozoon is responsible for the other 23. What this produces is a 'life' of unique DNA structure - a unique life has been conceived, and just like a six month old child, it has metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction (albeit on a much smaller scale). 

What we have is a process lasting several days whereby the zygote enters the uterus, the cells continue to divide, until a blastocyst is formed (for those unaware, a blastocyst looks a bit like a ball of cells). Implantation is when the blastocyst attaches to the lining of the uterus (this takes a few more days).

The blastocyst has fully attached itself to the endometrium within about ten days after conception, and therefore a woman would know that taking the morning after pill would either prevent an egg from being released from the ovary, or it would facilitate the necessary biochemical changes to the womb so that any fertilised blastocyst is unable to implant and become an embryo.

Therefore, a woman who took the morning after pill a day after unprotected intercourse knows that if a pregnancy was going to occur through natural genetic algorithms then her action would prevent pregnancy. Is that abortion? Is that murder? Surely not. What about a woman who finds out she is pregnant after 10 days and takes Mifepristone on the eleventh day, terminating her pregnancy? It's the sorites paradox all over again.

Doctors have another definition of death - they define death as the point at which electrical activity in the brain ceases. Embryos do not have a brain so in legal terms a woman who takes Mifepristone to kill an embryo hasn’t killed a human life if one defines human life in terms of electrical activity in the brain.

When a loved one is in an accident and loses all cognitive capacity, it might fall upon you to choose whether or not to retract the feeding tube and end your loved one’s life. A lot of people have a hard time agreeing on whether or not assisted suicide is murder. Similarly, consider as an analogue the issue of embryonic development. There is a set of cells at the beginning, and what at some point we would call a ‘human’ collection of cells at the end.

Now imagine five countries, each differing on the their interpretation of the embryonic and foetal developmental stage. Imagine in those five countries each has a law that states it is illegal to abort after an embryo becomes a ‘human’. But when we look at each country's law book we find that each country differs in its definition of ‘human’ – one defines it as when electrical changes occur, one when the blood starts pumping, one when the brain is fully formed, one when the embryo develops a functioning nervous system, and one when fingernails begin to grow. Under those circumstances, none of the five countries can claim to be objectively correct in its constitution. 

Why is killing a sperm or an egg more immoral than killing a zygote, and why is that more immoral than killing a morula, and why is that is more immoral than killing a blastula, and why is that more immoral than killing gastrula, and why is that more immoral than killing a foetus at four months? The morals don't even begin to take a footing until the epistemological category distinctions are agreed upon - and they rarely are in this debate.

On the flawed view that abortion is wrong because all life is sacred

Quite obviously, a claim that all life is sacred and to be preserved is not only absurd, it is biologically impossible. We can't easily afford sperm and eggs the same regard for life as a five month old foetus, just as we can't easily afford microorganisms the same regard for life as sperm and eggs. It may be easy to avoid aborting a foetus if you are against abortion, but it’s impossible to live from day to day without being complicit in killing bugs and insects and microorganisms.

Every time you clean the kitchen worktops or do some gardening, living things are killed. When your house was built, millions of tiny living things had to die for that to happen. Yet I presume even the most ardent anti-abortionist is not opposed to the idea of gardening and house building. Consequently, there is no absolute sanctity of life - we commit genocide on microorganisms on a regular basis.

Moreover, even if two people agree that all pre-natal life is sacred after conception, who is going to regulate this? It takes a long time for the two nuclei to merge and form a diploid after one sperm enters the egg. At what point in this process does life become sacred? 

The earliest we could speak of 'pregnancy' would be the implantation of the embryo - although in almost every case there is a long period of time between implantation and human detection. Most women don't know they're pregnant until a few weeks after conception. Sexual intercourse produces large amounts of spermatozoa, most of which do not fuse with the ovum and produce successful fertilisation - so even the act of sexual union is an act of biological profligacy. Taken to an absurd limit, even sex can compromise the sanctity of life.

The upshot is, there is no clear cut objective point at which one can say an act of abortion is ‘murder’, because if the objection is the denying the potential of so-called sacred life then contraception and the morning after pill would indict the couple too.

Final point: Why I don't think there are many absolute anti-abortionists

I have a thought experiment to show why I think those who say they are against abortion under any circumstances are probably not telling the truth. Picture the scene – it’s 50 years in the future and a sadistic dictator has control of a large island which he uses as a closed incarceration camp for the sexual gratification of his huge army.

All the women there are captive and feel there is no chance of escape. They are ostensibly kept alive to be the sexual playthings of the sadistic army, where each woman’s daily routine is to be raped dozens of times, and this process is repeated every day.

Some of the men are perverted and like sexual perversion with children. Because of this, if a woman becomes pregnant she is still raped for as long as she can be until the baby’s birth, and then along with her daily rapes she is forced to raise a child until he or she is a few years old and can be the sexual plaything for the more perverted army men. Pregnancies are rare because the women are forced onto the pill – after all, pregnancies only impede the men’s enjoyment and it cuts short the woman’s potential for being an optimally shaped sexual slave. 

One day, one of the captives falls pregnant - knowing full well that the baby will be born, and that by the time her child is six or seven he or she will be a sexual slave for the perverted men. And then when the child is older he or she will go into the other rape camp, spending the rest of his or her life being a sexual salve raped dozens of times every day. 

Now, the woman is just 10 days pregnant when she is offered Mifepristone by another of the inmates who takes pity on her – an elderly lady who is herself a sex slave, but who still has one Mifepristone which she was keeping for herself in case she ever fell pregnant. 

To those, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, who think abortion is wrong under any circumstance, I put the following question to you (or any who hold an uncompromising view). Given the woman’s choices (these are the only two choices she feels she has, having been born into this horrible set up, herself a victim all her life) – she can either take the Mifepristone, being pretty sure that she will save her future child from a life of brutal sexual slavery, or she can bring a child into a world in which she knows that from about 5 years old to death that child will have a life consisting only of being a rape victim dozens of times a day, every day.

I fancy that that majority of even the most hardline anti-abortionists would not wish to deny this poor lady the Mifepristone - and for that reason, most anti-abortionists who say they would not advocate abortion under any circumstances are probably either being dishonest with themselves, or probably capable of some pretty unpleasant emotional sadism.

On Smacking Children

As those who know me will predict, I'm not comfortable with the Scottish government's ban on smacking children - I don't think governments running a country in loco parentis is a good thing. That said, I don't think smacking children is the best way to teach children, and even though I don't want it to be illegal, I think parents do their parenting best when they don't smack their children (in a previous Blog post I talked about an important distinction between disapproving of things and banning them).

My reasons for thinking smacking children is not a good idea are fairly straightforward:

1) I think it is entirely desirable (and entirely possible) to bring up well turned-out kids without having had to smack them. My one caveat is the possible exception of a reactionary smack on the back of the leg to warn them of the severity of dangers and hazards - such as if they'd just attempted to run into a busy road, or gone near a fire, or something like that. But that should only be a light leg slap on children not old enough and too short-term in their mentality to rationalise the utility of incentives through things like longer-term financial punishments and rewards.

2) It is obvious from watching parents who regularly scream at their kids and smack them with infuriation that the kids can easily become desensitised to it, and it therefore often fails to have the desired effect. This then increases the chances of parents losing control of their disciplining measures and further taking it out on their young ones, which increases the chances that children will grow up to be similar to how their parents were.

On that last point, the New Scientist had an article out yesterday telling us about the future harms of smacking children. They tell us how children who are smacked are more likely to misbehave, and to engage in delinquent, criminal or antisocial behaviour, more likely to go on to experience emotional and physical abuse and neglect, more likely to go on to be aggressive themselves, and that they are also at a higher risk of having low self-esteem, depression or alcohol dependency.

All this may be true, but it's quite possible that the New Scientist article writer, Jessica Hamzelou, has misunderstood the causality, or at the very least failed to ask the proper question an economist would ask: Does being smacked really have a big effect on those future harms (as Jessica Hamzelou reasons, and for which she cites evidence), or is it more so the case that people in the group that are most likely to experience those future harms are also people most likely to be brought up in environment in which smacking is common?

Or to put it more directly, the less well off you are, on average, the less educated (and possibly more frustrated, marginalised and psychologically maladapted) you are likely to be, and the more likely you are to use smacking as a form of discipline (I read research on this a few years ago, which I've dug up for you here and here) 

There are fairly obvious economic reasons for this. Wealthier people have on average more options available to them, a frequently less-tough and challenging time bringing up children, more ways to discipline and disincentivise children from bad behaviour (withhold generous allowances, take away the child's laptop and mobile phone, send them off to boot camp for four weeks in the summer holidays, etc), as well as stronger social and familial groups in which to parent.

I was only smacked about four or five times as a child, from what I can recall to memory, and it did no good - all it taught me was the experience of a few isolated moments (in an otherwise wonderful childhood) of my father temporarily being unable to instil any rational method of discipline - that in those snap moments he was unable to choose a more suitable method of punishment.

But on one occasion I experienced the hardest punishment of my whole childhood for something I'd done wrong. I was forced to go without my computer and television and books for a period of time and was instead sent to bed early to think about what I'd done wrong. That was agonising - the unbearable experience of childhood boredom, devoid of the things I loved to do.

So if you want to incentivise children to behave better, my advice would be, don't smack them - either hit them in the pocket by withdrawing their allowance, or take away their privileges like the Internet, computer games and television until they've learned their lesson. 

 

 

How's This For A Great Piece Of Ingenuity?

There's a Mumbai suburban railway system that carries more than 6 million commuters a day, meaning the task for the authorities to check for tickets is extremely difficult. The system to discourage ticketless travel relies on random ticket checking - but with more than 6 million commuters a day, the chances are that if you travel without a ticket you will escape getting caught more often than not.

However, with everyone aware of this low probability of getting caught, this will likely increase the number of people travelling without a ticket, which then increases the number of people that will get caught in a random check.

So, the story goes, someone in Mumbai came up with a clever money-making insurance idea that seems to benefit all parties involved. It works like this - if you are a daily traveller, then you sign up to become a member of this organisation of local train travellers. You pay 500 rupees (which is about £6) to join this organisation of fellow ticketless travellers. Then, if you do get caught travelling without a ticket, you pay the fine to the authorities and then hand over your receipt to the organisation which refunds you all the money.

It's a neat little idea - however, I cannot help thinking that somewhere in Mumbai there is a ticket-collecting company in the making, to whom the train operators could outsource this work, and both parties could clean up.

Ask The Philosophical Muser: On MPs' Salaries

Here's my latest Q&A column - if you have any questions for me, you can message me on Facebook, or email them here j.knight423@btinternet.com

Q) When people have been moaning about our mediocre MPs being overpaid, some people have historically argued the opposite: that if we actually raised MPs' salaries we might attract better quality. My question is, what does economics suggest would be more likely, that higher salaries would attract better MPs or that it would just make our current run of the mill MPs even more overpaid?

A) In all probability it would be both. However, while we can all agree that overpaid mediocrity is a bad thing, I'm not sure that raising MPs' salaries to attract better politicians would necessarily be as desirable as you may think.

The reason being, you have to factor in the opportunity costs of having talented people in Parliament. Opportunity costs are the foregone opportunities that occur as a result of something taking place. For example, choosing to go bowling with the lads costs not just the price of the game, it costs in terms of what you might have done instead; a quiet night in with your wife, or a meal out with your family or a trip to the cinema with other friends.

Similarly there are opportunity costs to having very bright and talented MPs in that what is foregone is whatever they would do if they were not an MP. If a talented businesswoman becomes an MP then the UK must lose out on not having her in the business sector where she would probably create more value for society. If a brilliant male scientist becomes a brilliant politician then the UK may miss out on some important scientific discoveries or beneficial fieldwork.

It is far from obvious that a talented businesswoman and a brilliant scientist would do more good in the House of Commons than they would in their fields of expertise - in fact, my off-the-peg hunch is: almost certainly the opposite. Consequently, then, there may even be a good argument for keeping MPs' salaries low in order to dissuade very talented people from entering Parliament and costing society what they would have contributed instead.

Theresa May Shows Economic Ignorance Of The Worst Kind

From The Independent:

"The UK’s Big Six gas and electricity suppliers saw billions wiped off their stockmarket valuations after Theresa May outlined plans to go ahead with a cap on energy prices."

This is on the back of Theresa May's foolish announcement of a draft bill to impose an energy price cap for consumers in order to “bring an end to rip-off energy prices once and for all”.

Alas, because Theresa May is unapprised of basic economics, she seems to have it in her head that the nefarious energy firms are enjoying excessive profits at the expense of their customers. Here's where she is going wrong (any Corbynites who have the same idea about rent controls should grab a pen and paper too).

The word ‘excessive’ is a strange one when talking about profits, because excessive is a term that is relative to a perceived value or number. If the average height for a woman is 5ft 5in, and your sister is 6ft 2in, her height is excessive compared to the average. But ‘excessive’ profits in the market simply mean higher than expected, where expected means marginal revenues equal marginal costs of the standard textbook order we are more used to (most firms make a lot less profit than you probably imagine).

If an entrepreneur is making higher than expected profits, it indicates that he or she evaluated future projections better than competitors did - or if there’s a lack of competition, it indicates that he or she innovated ahead of others in the market. To do this you need to find a gap in the market that isn’t being filled, or identify better than others scarcity of supply or abundance of demand that are not being matched in equilibrium. Such entrepreneurs are the ones most likely to bid up the prices of goods that are not priced high enough, or not in sufficient supply, and push down the price of excessive outputs.

That’s short term. In the long run, though, we don’t want businesses to make excessive profits above the average cost of capital, because it means there aren’t enough competing forces for price efficiency. Competitors are the ones pushing the boundaries of innovation in order that they obtain their share of the profits, and in doing so they are contributing to increased value, better technology, more efficiency, and greater well-being and prosperity.

And that scenario is pretty much always what you see in a competitive market, because in the short term when profits are higher than expected due to some niche being found, or innovation-based success being enjoyed, there is room for others to enter that part of the market and add more value to society (you can click on my Energy part of the side bar to read why there are quite naturally only a few big players in the energy industry, and how they are not charging 'rip-off energy prices' as our dearly confused politicians seem to think). 

I wish our politicians would bear in mind this next important thing too. Most people don't know what it's like to be a large employer, so they hardly ever put themselves in the position of the corporation. They foolishly think that corporations have plenty of spare capital knocking around that can be confiscated and used to ramp up wages and pay people what politicians and their supporters have avowed that they 'deserve' (price caps are merely an indirect form of confiscation).

But even if it were not the case that corporate profits aren't that high, there is an even bigger picture that has to be factored in. Investors in large capital projects are not just the ones making the biggest risk of no return, they are the ones that stand to lose the most if the venture fails.

Good large scale investment is much harder than it sounds - you not only need a good assessment of the current market landscape, you need a solid eye for future landscapes and the concomitant probabilities that accompany that evaluation. This is even more of a compelling point when you remember that average profits hover around the 5%-7% mark. Time you factor in the large amounts of planning, building, and other capital investment to get the project off the ground, many entrepreneurs face a risk of a huge loss for a relatively small gain.

Given the foregoing, it's also easy to see how government policy designed to cap prices or extract high levels of tax from these companies makes the reckless assumption that the company's income will carry on at the same level - often failing to realise that some way down the line, price fixing and heavy regulatory protocols do a lot of invisible harm to businesses - harm that is off the radar - because, like the butterfly effect, the long chain of events that precede it are not tracked by the naked eye, and engender lots of tangible costs down the line that make prospective investment more precarious that it needs to be.

I wish politicians of all party colours would learn the very basic economic principle that you cannot impose these burdening interferences on the signals of supply and demand without changing a lot of behaviour and creating a lot of market disincentives that will have the knock on effect of harming the consumers they think they are helping. and make the marketplace more unstable for prospective investors. 

God, Mathematics & Münchhausen's Trilemma

At some point I'm going to do the final edits on my book on the question of what one might call 'is-ness' - a series of chapters that attempt to tackle mathematical and philosophical questions related to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. In the meantime, I'll try to summarise the kernel of the book's content in a short blog post. Here goes:

To attempt a philosophical stab at the big question of existence, I get about as far as I think I can get - which is roughly this. Something underpins reality - by that I mean there is a grand explanation for why existence 'is' - a reason that something exists instead of nothing. From what we've covered in previous blog posts, it's evident to me that physical reality isn't it. This leaves, I think, only two plausible contenders: God or mathematics.

Unlike our interpretations of God and mathematics, physics just doesn't seem to amount to a complexity powerful enough to contain an ultimate explanation. When we think of complexity, we think of a lower level complexity and an upper level complexity. The lowest level complexity would be something containing just a single bit of information. But once we start to think of an upper level complexity, we find that there really is no limit to how complex complexity can get. To me, such a realisation necessitates either one of the following:

A} Mathematics is the reason that existence 'is'.

B} God is the reason that existence 'is'.

Which is most likely to be true - A, B or neither? If it's neither A nor B then we are going to have to think up an alternative - and the trouble is, I don't think we humans have one, or are capable of arriving at one. It seems like it has to be God or mathematics, or possibly a concession that the mind goes blank, but where's the fun in that? So, on the question of whether it's God or mathematics, let's explore further.

Some statements can follow from other statements. If a minute is longer than a second, and an hour is longer than a minute, it naturally follows that an hour is longer than a second. Some statements are verified by having evidence to corroborate them. A 2017 Ferrari's 0-60mph time is shorter than a 2017 Nissan Micra's 0-60mph time, and it would be easy to corroborate this in a race.

 

The classic problem with general statements about ultimate existence is that neither of those qualities apply - that is, there are no further statements that can support them, and there is no evidence to corroborate them.

If there's no evidence for a statement, and that statement also follows on inferentially from any other statements, we run up against the Münchhausen trilemma - which says that we have only three options when providing proof:

1) The circular argument in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point)

2) The regressive argument in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum  (i.e. we just keep giving unending proof after proof)

3) The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)

The circular argument says that X therefore Y, and Y therefore X. For example, if the Bible is the word of God it will say it is the word of God; the Bible says it's the word of God, therefore it is the word of God. If the conclusion is also one of the premises, the argument is a logical fallacy.

The regressive argument is where we have a statement P that we try to explain by P1, which needs explaining by P2, and so forth - carrying on into an infinite regress of Ps. For example, God (P) is the cause of the universe. What then caused God (P1)? What then caused the cause of God (P2)?, and so forth.

The axiomatic argument is an argument that is self-evidently true without recourse to further proof. For example, a whole orange is greater than a segment of that orange. There is no logically valid argument that says a part of something is greater than the whole of that thing.

I've thought a lot about why God or mathematics are our best two ultimate explanations for reality, and therefore our two best efforts at conceiving that which is behind the existence of nature. With God or mathematics I think we give ourselves the best chance of reaching a final theory that may avoid circularity; a final theory that may halt the regression; and a final theory that requires the least amount of difficulty in providing justification.

To see why, consider our studies of biology; we can break down biology into eukaryotes, and eukaryotes into introns and exons, and further into encoding, and further into the physics of atoms and electrons, and further all the way down to mathematics. Breaking down different elements into isotypes is not the same thing, though, as breaking down numbers into different constituents of numbers, because with the latter we never depart from mathematics. To ask what is more primary than chemistry or biology is easy; to ask what is more primary than mathematics is probably to be guilty of asking something insurmountably difficult.  

However, mathematics doesn't help us defeat the tripartite problem found in the trilemma. Regressively mathematics seems to be a self-containing system; and axiomatically it provides a bedrock on which numbers are found. It also has a degree of circularity in that at a human level of perception it is bound up in human minds interpreting our own interpretation of reality. But it doesn't seem to me to satisfy the answer to the primary question of 'is-ness' quite as well as God does, and I think there is a subtle reason why, which I'm now going to explain.

Rather than having to choose between God and mathematics, it makes better sense to me to postulate God and mathematics together, with God being primary and mathematics being a property of that primacy cause. It seems to me impossible to even conceive of the mind of God without mathematics, because mathematics is a primary property of thinking.

This is because sentience involves the concept of quantification - there is nothing thought can do without the involvement of numbers. Numbers to thinking are rather like the property of wetness is to water. By the same logic, it seems to me we can't have mathematics without an up and running sentience to think it.

Consequently, out of the two I can make more of a case for God being the primary cause and mathematics being a necessary part of God's mind than I can mathematics being the primary cause with no sentience behind it. To postulate God as the ultimate cause is not to deny that mathematics is more primary than nature - for mathematics may well be instantiated in the mind of God. As I said, it may not even make sense to talk of God's mind or consciousness without imputing some kind of mathematical framework inhered in those Divine thoughts (if God is triune in nature, as Christianity tells us, then numbers are implicit in God's tri-aspectual personality) .

If the Divine mind is the ‘is-ness’ that contains the primary Truth (capital T) that governs existence, then His is the reality from which there is no sense of beyondness. If God is the creator and the Aseity we are looking for to close down the explanatory protocols, then it would stand to reason that it is His mind that has an ontology whose non-existence would be an impossibility, and therefore the reason there is something rather than nothing.

How You Should Buy Wine

An advert from a company called Naked Wines came onto my newsfeed this evening, stating that:

"The average £5 bottle of wine sold in the UK only contains about 40p worth of wine. The rest goes on marketing, duty, shipping and packaging. Spend £10 and you get £2.76 worth of wine - SEVEN TIMES more. That’s because every single extra penny is now going towards the juice."

True or false? Well, while one can acknowledge that this is a marketing ploy from a company that appears to be doing very well, there is some truth in it. Given that a proportion of wine's retail price goes towards marketing, duty, shipping and packaging, you will get qualitatively better wine if you spend a few pounds more.

But only up to a point - you'll get to a stage, probably in prices that exceed around £25, whereby you are trading off additional quality for enhanced brand reputation, and it's not always worth it. As we know from past testing, it’s unclear whether anyone can actually tell the difference between a £2,000 Lafite Bordeaux and a £10 bottle of Merlot, as blind tastings and academic studies demonstrably show that neither nascent consumers nor so-called expert judges can consistently differentiate between fine wines and cheap wines, nor identify the flavours within them. So choose your wine carefully - not too cheap but not too expensive either.

To finish, I want to tell you something in economics that may interest some of you. It's to do with how the ancillary charges attached to wine actually create a surprising truth about who drinks the best wine. Consider Burgundy wine, which is shipped from France to the UK. Now ask yourself this question: where do people, on average, drink better Burgundy wine, France or the UK? The obvious answer is France, since that's where the wine is produced. But like many obvious answers, it is likely to be wrong. In actual fact, there is a good reason why people, on average, may drink better Burgundy in the UK. Here's why.

Let us suppose, for ease, that there are only two types of Burgundy wine - wine A and wine B. Wine A is very nice and wine B is quite nice. In France, wine A is £8 per bottle and wine B is £4 per bottle. The relative price of a very nice wine in France is two bottles of quite nice wine. The opportunity cost of a Brit drinking wine A is not drinking 2 x wine B.

However, in the UK the price of wine involves the price of shipping large quantities of wine. Suppose it costs £4 per bottle to ship wine from France to the UK; A Brit must pay £12 for a bottle of wine A and £8 for a bottle of wine B. The relative price of wine A in the UK is only 1.5 x wine B

In other words, a French person who chooses a bottle of wine A passes up 2 bottles of wine B, whereas a Brit who chooses a bottle of wine A passes up just 1.5 bottles of wine B, making wine B more attractive to a Brit than a French person. Because of this, the average quality of Burgundy wine in the UK will likely be higher than it is in France.

Now on that note, drink and be merry, and enjoy your not too cheap but not too expensive wine!! :-)

Government Spending: A Convenient Fact That Keeps Getting Forgotten

Who is most entitled to the money a government spends?  That's a question often asked, with everyone from young people, old people, unemployed people, incapacitated people, students, and creative people being said to be strong candidates.  The proper way to ask the question is the way that a lot of people do not ask it - by considering the expenditure as being borne by the taxpayers' not the government (the government is basically a repository for spending our money). In other words, while most people realise that government expenditure is really taxpayers' expenditure, they don't seem to give enough weight to the correlation (or lack thereof) between government expenditure policy, and where we, the providers of that money, would actually like the money to be spent. 

For example, when Iain Duncan Smith says that no individual should receive more than £26,000 in benefits (i.e. not more than the average wage of workers, even though that's a figure in excess of most workers), the question of whether the policy is a good one for the taxpayer is for the greatest part a question of whether this is what the majority of people want.  Given that government spending is made up of taxpayers' contributions, any claim of entitlement by any candidate for the money should not be taken for granted, as such a claim must be considered in terms of whether the public would want to finance such a venture. 

Here's a good way to illustrate this.  Imagine an island called Appleville 1 which has only four citizens (Pete, Lisa, David and Jenny), and nothing but apple trees for food. Pete, Lisa and David each work to collect 3276 apples per year (63 per week), ensuring they have enough to survive.  Realising that Jenny is not able to collect enough apples to survive, the good ship Welfare decides she needn't collect anything herself, and hence it sails in once a week and gives Jenny 70 apples per week (remember that's 7 more than Pete, Lisa and David who work for theirs). 

Now a rule change; Pete, Lisa and David get to vote on how many apples the good ship Welfare gives to Jenny - they can vote:

A) 70

B) 63

C) 56

If we assume that Pete, Lisa and David have views that are pretty consistently shared by the wider UK demographic, I'd wager that they'd either vote for B or C.  They'd either feel that a non-worker should be getting fewer apples than someone who actually works for their apples, or if they're feeling kind and generous they might agree to give Jenny the standard 63 that they are able to earn and she is not. I can't, however, think that very many would opt for Jenny having 70 apples, particularly as what the good ship Welfare gives to Jenny on Appleville 1 it does so at the expense of other citizens on Appleville 2 who've worked to acquire theirs. On those grounds, Iain Duncan Smith's proposal seems to be a pretty good one, if 'pretty good' means a policy that reflects the wishes of the people the government represents. 

So the wisdom that should always be employed is this: whenever we consider to whom the government gives our money, the relevant question is not " How much (if anything) do we require the government to pay to x, y or z?" but rather "How much (if anything) do we require the UK taxpayers to pay to x, y or z?". 

These are the kind of real life issues that pop up all over the place in society. Jenny is disabled and unable to work, and Lisa works in a bank.  Does Jenny have any sense of entitlement towards Lisa's earnings because Lisa is able bodied and Jenny is not?  Jenny is a university student, and Lisa runs a bakery.  Does Jenny have any sense of entitlement towards Lisa's earnings because Jenny chose to study instead of going straight into employment?  Jenny is a single mum, and Lisa is a police sergeant.  Does Jenny (and her baby) have any sense of entitlement towards Lisa's earnings because Jenny fell pregnant by an unreliable man? 

Whatever your views are on the government's redistribution of wealth, these are the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself. You should never just pass off government money as an abstract figure that comes from on high. Understanding how money changes hands is the first good step in understanding how you think it should be spent. Politicians don't think this way very often because the money they are spending is not their own. Thinking about the money being spent as you would like it spent increases your likelihood of making politicians accountable.