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.

 

Why There Is No Such Thing As The 'Centre Ground' Of Politics, And Never Has Been!

Jeremy Corbyn thinks the political mainstream has shifted to the left of centre, and that his brand of politics is going to be the barometer for many more disaffected voters in years to come. It's hard to say how accurate Corbyn's hypothesis is because there hasn't ever really been a political centre. At best, the mythical centre ground has been a kind of weighted average of a diverse range of socio-political views that encapsulate both left and right wing beliefs in both the social discourse and the economic discourse.

Here's how the myth of the centre gathered intellectual traction over the years. Because of all the left vs. right wing squabbling, many people have tried to claim themselves to be the more reasonable moderates that sit somewhere in between two extremes - in the proudly occupied 'centre ground' of politics. But it's just not true that the best position on most social and political issues lies somewhere in the middle - life is just not like that in most other areas of objective truth and empirical facts, and it's not like that in politics either (see here for further reading).

One doesn't adopt a middle position about whether it's fine to drop litter, or whether it's good to put diesel in a petrol engine, or whether it's wise to accept astrology as true, so why should anyone expect a middle position on subjects like abortion, same-sex marriage, price controls, assisted dying, environmental issues, the qualities of trade and the harms of retarding it? People have convicted opinions one way or the other - and the judgement about who is right and who is wrong is one for the intellect and the emotional intelligence.

There is not some kind of central ground comprising a reservoir of middle positions. The weighted average of socio-political views that make up our society is not like mixing blue, red, yellow, purple and green paint, it is more like a deep pool of blue, red, yellow, purple and green coloured balls. Consequently, when political parties try to win elections by appealing to the so-called centre ground, you know what they are really doing: they are trying to win a popularity contest a la carte by selling themselves as a weighted average of society's preferences, which is as illusory as it is empty (see here and here and here for further reading)

Given the foregoing, to what extent, then, is there a genuine appetite for hard socialism, and to what extent is Corbynmania merely an extreme cult of personality movement that has been allowed to get out of hand by a mob of credulous individuals?

  

To see why I think it's the latter, consider this hypothetical question: It's the eve of the Labour leadership contest in 2015, and Jeremy Corbyn is tragically murdered by a far right extremist. One of the other candidates (Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendall) becomes leader, and we have an alternative history in which there is no cult of personality developing around Corbyn, no huge influx of new party members signing up, no barmy shadow cabinet that wants to take Britain back to the economic plight of the 1970s - just a mainstream, unremarkable, business as usual Blairite leader that may or may not have gone on to win the next election.

I think it's pretty evident that under this scenario, without Corbyn, this mass proliferation of hardline socialism, the putrid sense of envy and entitlement from the young, and the vulgar and aggressive intolerance for people that disagree with them would not have become as mainstream as it has - it would have remained within the remit of the fringe lunatics who stand on street corners with sandwich boards declaring that "Capitalism is Dead".

The other main reason I suspect that the rise of hard socialism is really about a cult of personality is that this generation more than any other is a generation in which the anachronisms of Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory - that history is written by the impact of a minority of charismatic and powerful men - have been well and truly put to bed.

If Corbynmania is an attempt to blow the dust off the outmoded idea that individual humans are good candidates for being put on pedestals - an idea that was already beginning to die alongside the likes of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Kingsley Amis and Harold Pinter - then the intellectual vacuity of the man and his ideas suggest very much that Corbynmania amounts to a personality cult where the leader's proclamations are uncritically and gullibly swallowed whole by a large group of people that are easily led and easily manipulated into some kind of mass hysteria of nonsense.

Don't Be Fooled By Mrs May: No Party Is Really On Our Side At The Moment

After the Labour Party has spent this week explaining how they plan to ruin our economy if they get in power, soft-socialist Theresa May has come out today in support of free market capitalism. Quite why she did this is beyond me, because everyone knows she's no friend of the free market, and no one is going to be fooled by any claims to the contrary. Actions, as always, speak louder than words - and her actions regarding our economy show that she is very much part of the socialist wing of the Conservative Party.

But alas, she is not alone - there are no defenders of free markets in mainstream politics at the moment - even the conservatism of Thatcher (and even that wasn't wholly market-friendly) was replaced by the Blairite Cameron government before Theresa May took charge. Voters who understand economics, and are therefore small state, low taxation, pro-market voters, have nobody to vote for in mainstream politics.

Aside from the many ways that politicians are harming our economy, what's also happening is that two other things are making it harder for the average Brit to thrive - one is foreign competition (foreigners being able to do things cheaper than us) and two is that competition success is creating a power law whereby more wealth is concentrated into the hands of the world's best innovators.

However, if you remember that the biggest measure of our prosperity is consumption - that is, what we get to consume - then both those things are actually good for us. Foreign competition is good for us because it helps us consume a more diverse range of things less expensively (a double winner) and competition success is good for us because it means big-scale providers are supplying us with things that we value hugely (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Sainsbury's, etc) and doing so by outcompeting less efficient rivals.

Take Google, Amazon and Facebook - the odds are that when you turn on your computer, if you want to search for some information you'll use Google, if you want to buy a book you'll use Amazon, and if you want to do some online socialising you'll use Facebook.

Now the thing is, the market dominance of Google, Amazon and Facebook is not because there is no competition out there, it's because those three are currently the best at what they do. In 25 years it may be that hardly anyone uses any of those sites - they probably won't if they've been replaced by better alternatives. Or quite possibly, those sites will become even better and they will have increased their market dominance even more. The consumer will decide.

As well as being great at what they do, another reason why big companies have a lion's share of the market is that they are also very good at using competition to their advantage. In a highly competitive industry, there is selection pressure on innovation, and penalties for inefficiencies and complacency, so firms are always looking to improve the quality of the good or service and for a price that's more attractive to customers and potential customers.

When big firms get better, they make better profits, which means power law inequalities widen as more money goes to shareholders and those at the top. However, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, as I explain here - it's simply reward for merit-based ingenuity.

A common misconception is that if workers are getting slightly less of the economic pie then the way to correct it is for politicians to redress the imbalance by penalising the rich with heavy taxation in order to redistribute the wealth more evenly. But this overlooks two key things - one, that the pie is not fixed, and two, that increasing innovation at the top is what is helping to create jobs for the workers.

Therefore, the best way for politicians to address the concerns of the electorate regarding job creation and having enough money to live on each week is to help make the economic pie grow; and the best way they can help the pie grow is by slashing public spending, lowering taxes and lightening regulations that harm growth. That way you help enable competition to flourish, and as we've seen, it is that flourishing that will help the UK become a haven for economic growth that can benefit from foreign competition, from big business innovation and from a bigger sized economic pie.

Two deep contradictions at the heart of the left
The left really need to get their heads around what they believe about the harms of taxation. Here's a test: next time you're with a lefty, try to pin them down on whether or not they acknowledge that tax affects economic behaviour negatively. If they say yes, then you can watch them try to wriggle out of why they themselves don't argue for lower taxes. If they say no, then you can ask them to think about why tax competition is such a prominent thing for attracting businesses through lower taxes, and why politicians try to be a little bit competitive in looking to be parties that lower taxes whenever possible. They can't have it both ways, which kind of tells you all you need to know about the fact that their motives are not really about what's good for the society and the economy.

The other thing that strikes me as odd is that everyone in Labour's shadow cabinet evidently wants to stay in the single market, because even they realise that trading with Europe tariff-free benefits both agents involved in the exchange. But if they can understand that, why don't they apply the rationale to its next logical level - that if open, low-regulation trade enhances mutually beneficial transaction between nations, it is going to do the same between trading agents within nations (like, for example, Uber and its customers, tenants and landlords, etc)? Alas, I think we all know the answer to that, don't we?