The Symmetry of the Extremes

 

The extreme left and extreme right who continue to dominate the headlines may be extremely opposed in viewpoints, but they are highly alike in terms of instincts, temperament, and having the same blind spots. They may hate each other, but they are similar in their underlying psychological style and the way they process social reality.

To think of one or two examples off the top of my head, the extreme right displays a hugely disproportionate hostility towards immigration, whereas the extreme left is too soft, and in denial, refusing to acknowledge any challenges or trade‑offs at all. Another one, the extreme left tends to trivialise or overlook the complex structural and personal factors that leave people struggling financially, while the extreme right frequently lacks the empathy and attentiveness needed to understand the genuine pressures those same people face. And another, the extreme right tends to idealise tradition by demanding conformity, and trivialising diversity in ethnicity, culture and identity, whereas the extreme left tends to idealise equality by demanding conformity, and trivialising diversity in skill, talent, effort, competence, and risk. It would be easy to think of many more examples.

The upshot is that neither side is a healthy one to be on, because both approaches misunderstand more things than they illuminate. Both overlook the complex structural and personal factors that shape people’s circumstances and constrain their choices; both misunderstand the complexity of how people reveal their preferences, and form meaning and belonging; and both extremes build their politics on half‑truths, oversimplifications and extremities that don’t map onto the highly complex, multifaceted lived reality of society

Beneath the bluster, each extreme is animated by the same moral certainty and ideological intransigence, leaving little room for humility, revision, or the possibility that the world is more complicated than their beliefs, policies and slogans allow. And any politics that forgets that will always get the world more wrong than it does right.

The Mercy in Price Hikes

Some people are getting agitated and hostile at the pumps. Now, I know the cost of living pressures are tough, and I sympathise. But what we have here is an arithmetic challenge that’s basic Econ 101, and it’s not the people selling fuel who are at fault. In fact, quite the contrary – raising prices in a time of shortage is the least bad thing for us. Here’s why.

Before hostilities began, the world consumed roughly 100 million barrels of oil each day. But with Iran limiting the Strait of Hormuz to most international shipping, we read that only about 80 million barrels are now reaching global markets. That’s the arithmetic problem for the global economy: until that bottleneck eases, the remaining 20 million barrels of daily demand must effectively be squeezed out. And the only mechanism capable of enforcing that reduction is higher prices. Now let me reassure you that it’s the least bad thing for us.

As you’ve heard me say before, at its core, economics is the study of human behaviour regarding competing preferences and how societies allocate scarce resources among competing uses. Prices are the signalling system that makes this allocation possible – and higher prices are vital information signals, telling buyers, in real time, that the resource is now more valuable relative to its availability.

Now, here’s what’s happening across society that you won’t fully see because it’s so thinly spread. Many of those who can put the resource to its most productive or urgent use are willing to pay more for it, while many who value it less step back. Tragedy of the commons issues aside, here prices reveal the hierarchy of preferences across millions of people – those transactions are revealed preferences showing those who value the fuel the most at the margin.

Naturally, no price signalling mechanism is perfect – for obvious reasons – but the alternative is far worse. Without price signals, scarcity would have to be managed through much less effective ways. The price system gives us the best whack at creating a relatively orderly, decentralised way of matching limited supply with the people who can use it most effectively and need it most during the tension.

Dodgy Lookalike Beliefs

Criticisms of one misjudged thing often mirror the properties of criticisms for other misjudged things. Think of the critique of socialism as a mirror for the critique of identity politics, climate alarmism, cult membership, and groups of that nature. We are critical of socialism, but a key part of that criticism involves a natural critiquing of the motives, intentions and psychological biases that underpin this dubious economics. It’s not like we are saying socialism is flawed because its proponents are of a dodgy ethical and intellectual disposition – it’s that its flaws are based on bad and myopic economics, but also that the bad and myopic economics doesn’t come from nowhere – it is bound up in a whole host of complex psychological, tribal and emotional factors that cannot be divorced from the viewpoints.

The other thing that is clear about extreme left wingers is that what often masquerades as care for the poor is largely a product of intense dislike towards other people’s successes. That is a complex matter that probably deserves a blog of its own (although people like Orwell have made the point before) – but suffice to say here, the inner animus, bitterness, resentment and narcissism that boils up in extreme lefties complaining about the economy and damaging our society is a key driver in the formation of their opinions, and remains a psychological factor that cannot reasonably be divorced from the professed beliefs being espoused.

Similarly, to have a proper understanding of dodgy lookalike groups like the aforementioned, one needs to understand the mental manifold that drives the beliefs, and the cultural patterns that give rise to this kind of conditioning. Certain people who are ideally psychologically primed make good candidates for extremism and cultism. The main thing to keep at the forefront of your mind is that those involved in extreme religious or political fundamentalism are not really concerned about the information they are peddling. They write as though the content is everything - but really it isn't - they are just groups of people who have the kind of psychological disposition that is best fed by a 'my way or the wrong way' kind of mentality.

And, as ever, the old chicken and egg question looms large: does predisposition to ungrace cause a gravitation to fundamentalism, or does assent to fundamentalism cause consequent ungrace? And we can no doubt add many other variables to that structural model.

 

Odds, Ends and Stray Musings: Three Types of People

 

The world can be split into 3 groups of people

 

1. Those who know less than they need to.
2. Those who know about as much as they need to.
3. Those who know more than they need to.

 

There are only a few things the average person needs to know about, say, showers, car tyres and garden plants to get by (as long as there are experts to call on). But there are things that many people ought to know but don’t, which is having a detrimental effect on their ability to get by. Things like how to treat people to maximise relationships, how to get the best out of your work life, and knowledge about optimum health and nutrition, to name but three. 

Lastly, those who know more than they need to fall into two camps, those who have invested more time than they need to on things, and those who acquire the knowledge they need and then dig deeper, ask more questions, and acquire knowledge that most others don’t even think about. At first glance, this might look like excess. But in reality, it’s the surplus of knowledge in this group that drives progress for human civilisation.

Group 3’s curiosity and mastery are not just personal quirks; they are the foundation on which society advances. While Groups 1 and 2 operate within what is necessary for survival, Group 3 explores what is possible for progress and pushes us into new frontiers.

Some Of The Curious Things About Supply & Demand

When it comes to goods and services in the free market, four things will happen: 

1) Increase in Supply

2) Decrease in Supply

3) Increase in Demand

4) Decrease in Demand

I'm sure readers who've been with me this long won't need explaining what the direction of the price and quantity arrows take with the various increases and decreases (here's a wiki page if anyone is unapprised).

The reason I'm writing this is that although most people know the basics, there is often a very wrong assumption made. Given the size and complexity of the market, it's fairly obvious that the variances on prices, supply and demand are impossible to predict precisely in the future, and hard to keep track of in the present. For this reason, in the short term it is not at all unusual to see prince increases and quantity increases for the same product (ditto decreases).

When we see cucumber or coffee or cereal consumption on the up (or down) while at the same time seeing the prices on the up (or down) it is simply a sign that within the laws of prices, supply and demand there are often underlying, unforeseeable events that add a bit of disorder into the mix. That is to say, in the short term, supply and demand arrows are not immutable; they are indicators that predict longer term behaviour, especially if one changes other things stay relatively constant.

Imagine Tom Joad eats lots of rice and a small amount of fish. As rice becomes harder to come by and the price starts to rise, his food budget is strained to the extent that he is has to cut back on fish and demand even more rice. The increased demand ramps up the price further and Tom Joad experiences a vicious rice-fish circle. Contrary to popular opinion, rising prices can in principle lead to increased demand, not decreased demand (this is what is referred to in economics as a 'Giffen good'). 

Put it this way, generally speaking though, if the consumption of rice, fish, cucumber or oranges steadily drops, you can be quite sure that in the long term production and (or) prices will be altered to match, and that's a general rule that's fairy reliable.

About 25 years ago in the UK, petrol pump protesters brought the country to a standstill by creating a shortage of fuel - and there was talk recently of it happening again. Naturally, prices increased and many angry consumers declared that when one or two firms hike up their prices on a particular product that that means they have a monopoly on that product. Not only is that usually not the case, it mostly reveals just the opposite; it exhibits healthy competition – it is competition revealing scarcity in this case that raises prices.

If something is in short supply (like, say, oil when there is a domestic crisis or trouble in the Middle East) it is assumed that the increase in price is due to a monopoly company hiking up its prices. If a company really could increase their supply with a supply restriction, they wouldn’t ned to wait for a domestic crisis or trouble in the Middle East to do so. The economy doesn’t facilitate the simultaneous profit from unrest and a single monopoly. 

At the time of the petrol crisis in Britain, some people even suggested that there should be a mandatory cap placed on individual sales – say of £30 or £40. As I said at the time, that’s a bad idea – a £30 or £40 cap on individual petrol sales probably would not have had the desired effect that many think – it would more than likely increase overall consumption, because even more people would head to the garage, and that would also cause more misallocation. 

It is as crazy as trying to regulate the crude oil supplies by legislation – one might as well forget the near-ineluctable law of economics, which says that prices go up when things are in short supply. That is exactly what happens – price controls play a part in controlling the wholesale level, meaning refiners minimise their fuel supply, meaning the prices at the pump go up, not down. Lower supplies means you pay more at the pump, so oil regulation has a bad effect for the consumer. 

Some People Might Be Just Too Hard To Satisfy

 

As I argued a few years ago in my blog about the Easterlin Paradox, individual happiness is fairly hard to measure, and global happiness is prohibitively hard to measure. Here are a few things, however, that my experience tells me are obvious. It's better to be rich enough to have the basic necessities for survival, comfort and pleasure than it is to be in poverty. Happiness can increase as income increases, but there will be a point at which this levels off. While richer people may find greater thrills in their status-mongering and individual accomplishments, less wealthy individuals who are not driven by status to the same extent may be happier in their relationships and internal motivations. 

The upshot is, if by magic we had a perfect measuring device for happiness, I wouldn't be surprised if the people who registered the highest levels of happiness were people who were (in no particular order) 1) reasonably well enough but not extremely rich, 2) pretty smart, 3) in a loving relationship, 4) involved in good inter-personal relationships, 5) in a relationship with God.

I mention this not as another philosophical commentary on the nature of happiness, but to probe another avenue of consideration. Are people unreasonably hard to satisfy? And is that especially true of people who are more left-leaning? That is to say, despite the financial difficulties of the past few years, and how admittedly dire politics is at present, if you measure over a much longer distance, then the economic growth and increased standard of living for UK citizens in the past 150 years has been so astounding that if you were transported from the Victorian age to the present day to see the astronomical progress we've made, you might justifiably expect there to be far fewer people always going on about how bad things are. I'm working on the almost certainly justifiable presumption that we all agree that being well off materially is preferable to being badly off materially. I know this on account that just about everybody behaves as though this is true, even though they are free to make decisions that support the alternative view.

What's been happening, it seems, is that the better off the UK has become, the more things people find to be angry at - and that seems to be because our enhanced standards of living afford us the luxury to complain about things our forebears would have been too poor to complain about. Today we think of people in hardship who our forebears would perceive as abundantly blessed. It's as though the better off we've become, the worse not being better off is relative to our advancements. Think of it like this; Geoff, who drives a Ford Sierra, is still using a 1990s phone, a VHS video player and portable colour television would seem to be struggling compared with the majority of the population who have better cars, a digital phone, and an HD smart television with access to hundreds of channels and thousands of films and programmes. But to a Victorian, Geoff's life would look absolutely amazing. We get unhappy about Geoff's life only because our fantastic increase in living standards has made his life seem worse than the expected average.

Look at how our lives have been enriched by technology, by increased knowledge, by supermarkets, by millions more jobs than ever before, by more leisure time than ever before, and by the countless ways that machines and devices now do things for us in seconds that once would have taken us minutes, sometimes hours, in the past. We can buy things cheaply (tax add-ons excepted), we can do most things without having to travel or make phone calls, and we have access to more knowledge, information, other people, goods and services than ever before. For most of us, our lives are economically and socially blessed (at least compared with the alternatives that have plagued our forebears, and still continue to plague many people in developing countries) - yet so many people fail to give this the proper regard.

Now, I'm not saying that none of the following deserve any of our complaints or calls for improvement at all - but I believe that everyone can be more enhanced by adopting a much better sense of perspective and gratitude. Supermarkets have revolutionised the shopping industry, saving us millions of pounds each year, yet many just want to complain about CEOs' pay. Amazon is the world's greatest ever shopping experience, saving us billions of pounds each year, yet so many complain about its tax contributions. And then there are social media platforms like Facebook, which enable us to socialise, organise events, share experience, have good discussions, meet people around the world we'd otherwise never meet. Skype lets us speak face to face with anyone in the world in a way that would seem like science fiction to people of 100 years ago. YouTube gives us access to pretty much everything that's ever been filmed - interviews, debates, films, music, education, and extraordinary moments across the world captured on camera, from the absurd to the shocking to the dangerous to the hilarious - it's fantastic. 

And then there's Google - giving us access to just about anything we could ever want to know. Here's the remarkable thing - every online product I just mentioned is provided free of charge: endless socialising, endless knowledge, endless entertainment - all readily accessible at no financial cost to just about all of us. And all that aside from the immense benefits that such enrichment confers to the wider world in terms of outside investment, access to trade and opportunity to develop. Yet when many think of Facebook and Google, they are so often preoccupied with wealth inequality and access to their data - when a few years ago they had no platform on which to have any data and to use those free services. 

There are, of course, justifiably grave concerns about big tech - especially the negative effect social media is having on young people. Although that does not mean its overall effect is net negative. I see it as a bit like alcohol; excessive use generally correlates with negative outcomes, whereas balanced, assistive, creative, relational use generally correlates with positive outcomes. 

Given the extent to which humans are hard to satisfy anyway, it seems to me that in the case of the vast majority of people regularly complaining about so much (especially on the left), they are unreasonably hard to satisfy. Even if we magically flicked a switch and wiped out all their current so-called 'injustices', they would probably just carry on coming up with more and more complaints - because, like Parkinson's Law, where work expands to fill the time available for its completion - I believe it's quite possible that the human tendency to complain expands to fill the space left by material progression and higher living standards. 

Knowing The Price Of Sex And The Value Of Nothing

As I was cycling through the city earlier this evening, I felt my regular lament at the ugly sight of graffiti tagging that spoils so many buildings. As far as I’m concerned, graffiti tagging on private property is carried out by selfish young men who have no respect for the buildings they are defacing or the people who are associated with them. And sometimes I think, if only females looked down on graffiti tagging (or other acts of criminality or irresponsibility like that) with more ridicule and contempt, boys would eventually stop doing it.

I know that sounds like an outlandish thought, but it has truths that are supported by evolutionary history and psychology (especially in the work of psychologist Roy Baumeister) regarding the dynamics of sex and attraction, where we know that women are largely the "gatekeepers of sex," and influence the behaviours and ambitions of men accordingly. Baumeister posits that women determine the standards men must meet to access sex, which complements a long-standing evolutionary principle that women primarily do the choosing and men compete to be chosen.

Although it works both ways, of course - while women are the primary gatekeepers of sex, men are primarily the gatekeepers of commitment and long-term relationships. Women, due to higher reproductive costs (such as pregnancy and childcare), are typically more selective in choosing sexual partners. This selectivity drives men to compete and adapt to meet women’s standards, shaping behaviours such as ambition, status-seeking, and displays of loyalty. But men are often more selective when it comes to committing to long-term relationships or marriage. While casual sex may require fewer standards, commitment demands more from potential partners - such as trustworthiness, compatibility, shared values, and longevity. Men historically needed to ensure their investment (e.g., time, resources) would be directed toward raising their biological offspring, which meant they were more likely to commit to women they deemed faithful and emotionally supportive.

Here, then, we see how responsibility is shared between the sexes. Women can provide good quality control for male behaviour, and men can improve their conduct to make them more desirable in terms of selectability. In fact, I don’t just mean that as a fanciful whim where one or two minor improvements could make a bit of difference (although that is still true) – I mean that if there were radical societal changes in terms of improvements of attitude, conduct, and mutual accountability between the sexes, we could start to reverse a negative trend and be on the way to becoming a Christian country more than ever before.

In economic terms, this goes back to the price of sex within societal norms. In a Christian society, the price of sex is higher than in a society run ragged by promiscuity and hedonism. This aligns with the Christian ideal of chastity. The female beloved insists on not just commitment, but virtue, respect, patience and noble intentionality from their prospective beloveds. And with sexual intimacy being a sacred act reserved for marriage, males share the responsibility in taking the lead to ensure the relationship is built on friendship, trust, love, and shared Christian values that transcend fleeting physical desire. This higher "price" for sex necessitates a framework where males must rise to moral and ethical standards of Christianity, and chastity would function not as a limitation but as a transformative force. Relationships of such stability, integrity and self-discipline benefit not only the couples themselves but also their roles and influence in the broader community.

As the "price" of sex has decreased in the modern time of easy divorce, sexual liberation and the breakdown of family values, so too have the efforts some men make to meet higher standards and women to insist on them. If sex is too freely available, men won’t aim for higher standards and societal decay will continue. Remember too that there is strong evidence in psychology that delaying gratification to prioritise long-term rewards over short-term pleasures is one of the cornerstones of emotional and psychological maturity.

The Next Ten Years Are Going to Be Ridiculous

Scientific and technological progress is accelerating so quickly that I regularly reassure my readers that the coming decades will bring unprecedented scientific, technological and economic progression on a scale so prodigious that they won’t be able to believe it. The trouble is, given that most people who most urgently need to hear this don’t read my blog - on account that statistically most people in the world don’t read my blog - the message of encouragement isn’t getting out there fast enough.

According to research I’ve read, current trends even in just AI show capacity growing more than 25× per year, vastly outpacing human research growth. Even if these rates slowed by a factor of 100, the combined cognitive labour of humans and AIs would still expand far faster than anything in history, potentially delivering hundreds of years of innovation within a single decade. Rapid gains in computational capacity, algorithmic efficiency, model scaling, and inference costs all contribute to the next phase of what I call the progression explosion, which will trigger a corresponding unprecedented surge in technological development, robotics, and industrial output.

There may, of course, be fresh things to contend with, with such acceleration - like misaligned AI, power concentration, entrenched authoritarianism (which is, alas, already happening), and other challenges posed by advanced digital minds. But they will probably be a spit in the ocean compared with the huge potential benefits - especially extreme abundance, medical breakthroughs, and rapid scientific and material progress.

And as I’ve blogged about before, these advances will create unprecedented possibilities for solving long-standing “future problems” like climate change. If AI-driven research acceleration really does condense centuries of innovation into years, then technologies we are still working on - ultra-efficient batteries, carbon-negative industrial processes, fusion breakthroughs, and advanced materials for energy storage - will arrive with prodigious application far sooner than most people imagine. Rapid scientific iteration, combined with autonomous experimentation, would allow AI systems to explore billions of design possibilities for catalysts, solar materials, carbon-capture membranes, and so forth, before you can say “Greta Thunberg hates cheeseburgers served at BP Garages”.

 

On Negative and Positive Desert

 

I think Jimmy McGovern’s The Street is one of the best British TV dramas ever. One of the many memorable episodes, like the one I rewatched recently, involves a racist called Kieran getting credit for saving a 7-year-old Polish girl, Anna, from a house fire, when, in fact, it was actually his friend Duffy who committed the heroic act. But Duffy dares not claim credit for his heroism because he fears it will jeopardise the invalidity benefit he’s claiming. Huge tension ensues when Kieran willingly accepts all the adulation while Duffy begrudgingly laments his lack of recognition.

During the episode, this got me thinking about something else; whether an act is still heroic if the person had no memory or awareness of it - and acted it out in a trance-like state, where they did not consciously undertake the deed through any sense of bravery or moral duty. Probably not, or at least, much less so. Put it this way, if the person claimed no memory or awareness of the good act, it seems inappropriate to reward them. But that being so, does the reverse also apply - that if someone acted out a wicked deed in a trance-like state, with no memory or awareness of it, should they go unpunished?

In one sense, I can understand the temptation to argue that if a lack memory or awareness negates positive desert, it similarly negates negative desert. But that can’t be wholly satisfactory for one key reason. Negated positive desert means that the hero is merely not afforded deserved recognition and adulation. But negated negative desert means the general public are not protected from a criminal who has not only harmed at least one victim, but may go on to harm others - so should be incarcerated on that basis.

On What Humility Really Is

 

“God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.”
(Proverbs 3:34, James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5)

From my experience, humility is one of the most misunderstood of all human qualities. So often, people consider humility to be things like timidity, circumspection, or a lack of self-confidence regarding a viewpoint. But that is not right; humility is best thought of as accurate self-assessment. That is, humility is not thinking less of yourself than you ought, it is thinking accurately about yourself. 

To be in true humility means you don’t inflate or diminish your worth, abilities, or moral standing. Humble people are willing to see themselves as they truly are - capable of love and goodness, but also deeply fallible - which is why God calls us to live a life full of humility.

The opposite of humility isn’t self-confidence, as many think - because self-confidence is justified alongside competence. The real opposite of humility is narcissism - which is the refusal to acknowledge one’s own faults, limits, and responsibility for the bad things one is doing or contributing to. That is why humility is much rarer than many imagine, and narcissism is more common. Humility threatens the ego’s carefully constructed narrative, whereas narcissism reinforces it.

And that is why revelation begins with humility: only the humble can hear God clearly, because only the humble are willing to know themselves truthfully before Him.

Everything At Once Part 2

 

If you’ve dipped into ancient Christian philosophy, you might have come across Boethius’ idea of how eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life, and how that means for us, as creatures created to spend eternity with God (should we choose to accept the gift), that there is a sense in which our state of being encompasses all of life at once (see an earlier blog post Everything At Once that conveys something similar).

I think there is a sense in which that’s true - and to see why, we only need to think of what it’s like being ourselves in the present moment. Our ‘now’ sensation encompasses our history, where we can recall to mind the time we had a burger and chips with our chum in secondary school, and the time we grazed our knee when falling off our skateboards, our first day at work, and so forth. Our whole remembered life is in us in the present moment, even though we’ve forgotten much of it. What is remembered is there.

God doesn’t have the problem of forgetting things; His perfect Mind persists through endless time by being both part of time and outside time altogether. He sees all events - past, present, future - in a single, timeless now. But while we don’t have perfect minds, we are made in His image, and we do, in one sense, possess the fullness or potential fullness of life all at once, in that everything we are, everything we’ve done, and everything we could be, are all part of a single, unfolding reality. A kind of unified experience of being in which there always exists the potential tapping into the ever-present totality of life - a bit like how a tree contains its whole life in a single moment: rings of the past, leaves and branches of the present, and all the future growth contained within, all existing together in the living organism.

Consider what this means for you and for your potential if you think about it in the right way. Imagine that your life is like a film reel composed of countless frames. Each frame shows a single moment of your experience - a snapshot of what you think, feel, and perceive at that instant. If your life is everlasting (this life and the afterlife), then the film reel simply stretches on forever. Frame follows frame, moment follows moment - the story continues indefinitely, but always one scene at a time. Now imagine something stranger. Suppose that instead of a film reel, your entire life is encoded in a holographic plate - a two-dimensional interference pattern that contains, within every microscopic region, the information for the entire three-dimensional image. In a hologram, the whole is present in every part: each tiny patch of the plate can reconstruct the whole scene, though with varying degrees of clarity. In this “holographic” version of your life, every point of time contains the fullness of your whole existence - not just a slice of it.

I like what that implies about our potential - and the fact that we are never all we could be. Through this model, every thought, every stage, every experience is co-present within the single timeless structure of your being, and you can tap into the entirety of your life simultaneously, as the hologram possesses the entire image for us to navigate at once. It gives a real sense of what you might call a totality waiting to be awakened step by step with each new improvement, every fresh edification from experience, and every new unfolding – that all that we could be is, in some sense, already here in potentia - shimmering beneath the surface of our awareness, waiting to be drawn into the light of our becoming. Life is a journey, of course, and a continual invitation to open ourselves up to the infinite depth that already dwells within.

The Economics of Exaggerated Victimhood

 

We keep hearing about increased anxiety in young people, and an increase in perceived victimhood. This might not be so strange except for the fact that there’s a good argument to be made that, negative social media influences aside, young Brits have been brought up in one of, if not the most, privileged, safest, most prosperous, most peaceable societies that’s ever been created. So, on the surface, you might think it strange that there is increased anxiety in young people, and an increase in perceived victimhood. But I have a theory that probably explains at least some of it.

This current society is one in which material risk and genuine adversity are relatively scarce - so in economic terms, you could say that the demand for meaningful challenges has begun to exceed the available supply. This imbalance creates a kind of market distortion in which individuals, unable to compete effectively in the constrained market for competence, shift toward the effectively more elastic market for perceived victimhood. In other words, because competence is constrained by reality (inelastic) while victimhood claims are effectively limitless (elastic) – the dynamic creates an effect whereby, because claims of harm can be produced at near‑zero marginal cost and yield high and often unjustified social returns in the form of various signalling effects, the result is inflation.

On top of that, there is another tactic employed to expand the supply of available victimhood claims – just keep broadening the definition of a problem until it applies to you. For example, in a society where racism, sexism or other forms of unfair discrimination become less frequent, the incentive emerges to stretch those categories to capture ever‑smaller offences or affronts, effectively increasing the pool of actions or events that can be framed as unfair discrimination.

It’s perhaps to be expected, therefore, that when genuine crises are diminished, synthetic ones emerge to satisfy unmet demand, allowing individuals to capitalise, and help create a market supply that caters for needs that have been exaggerated or fabricated. 

I say all this, not because I’m insensitive to genuine need, victimhood, and harm – because I’m really not. I’m actually highly sensitive and attuned to other people’s pain and suffering. No, I’m saying it because cultivated or courted victimhood is actually a malady for people’s well-being, because it makes them easy to manipulate. In a hyper-connected world, there is no shortage of bad actors who are looking to invoke your outrage, provocation and disharmony – and in the many exaggerated or fabricated cases, this not only diminishes your well-being, it also distracts you from primary responsibilities, and is highly likely to keep you perennially anxious, unsettled, ungrateful and resentful.

On Feminism

 

A feminist asked me what I think of feminism, so I told her a joke:

Why was the fraction nervous about marrying the decimal?

Standard Answer: Because he would have to convert. 

Feminist Answer: Because marriage is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy designed to trade and hold women like property. 😅

I then shared a profound truth that only a minority discern, but I hope you will. You don't need to be a feminist; you only need to be an egalitarian. If you're a feminist instead of an egalitarian, you're probably putting ideology before equality of opportunity – drawing battle lines in a fight that should have no sides.

If you’re still unsure why, think of it in terms of set theory. Egalitarianism is the broad set of beliefs that uphold equality of rights and opportunities for all people. Feminism is, at best, a skewed subset within it, and at worst, a narrow, reverse-sexist agenda that actually pushes against egalitarianism. Everything feminism purports to seek already falls inside the larger egalitarian set - so the fact that it’s promoted under the banner of feminism rather than egalitarianism suggests that it is really pushing against egalitarianism.

Valentine's Special: Is Your Partner Much Of A Catch?

 

Sometimes with beloveds I wonder, through an economist’s lens, what kind of a find he/she is in terms of numbers? 😃 That is to say, what kind of 1 in an n have I got? - where one always hopes n is a large number.  Is he/she a one in a hundred thousand, one in a million, one in a hundred (lol)? Naturally, you could say about any unique individual that they are 1 in n, where n is the number of (wo)men in the world today (or, as a subset, number of viable prospective partners). But we are not really asking that question; we are asking what kind of a catch our beloved is, in terms of the dating equivalent of price systems, matching markets and implicit valuation of preferences.

If you want to play along in your head, start by considering what you think your partner is in terms of catchiness – where someone highly desirable by many scores high in catchiness, and someone less desirable scores low in catchiness. Perhaps, like my wife is, you are with one of those one in a million male beloveds – one of those astounding finds that you almost can’t believe he came along at all 😃. Or maybe you’re with someone who was on the shelf for years, and you had to pull them off to save them from more decades of singleness and tracksuit-bottomed repeats on UK Gold 😃

I guess, suffice to say, the approximate 1 in an n value you assigned in your head definitely comes from an intuitive and rational calculation, because it’s the same kind of mental calculation we make when deciding how much we value fruit, cheese and trousers. That’s what the price system is for.

Similarly, a prospective partner can be viewed as a scarce resource in a two-sided matching market. Each individual possesses a set of attributes - physical, intellectual, emotional - that confer utility to potential matches. The rarity of certain combinations of attributes increases their “market value,” analogous to goods with limited supply but high demand.

What we know intuitively and rationally in terms of our specific partner is that they are part of the equation whereby the probability of encountering a partner with a specific combination of desirable attributes is a function of the distribution of those attributes in the population, alongside the selectivity of other agents in the market. Thus, in contemplating a partner’s “catchiness,” you are implicitly assessing their expected utility relative to the available alternatives and the opportunity cost of forgoing other potential matches.

Do with all that what you wish 😃

 

Cutting The Psychological Root Of False Beliefs

It’s strange that so many people believe so many obviously false things (which includes excessive over-interpretations). Let me offer you a hopefully useful way to think about the nature of false beliefs in a more expansive way. When people believe so many false things, you’ll find that those individual false beliefs are often trojan horses for other beliefs, which at their root are usually rationalisations for self-serving interests. If false belief x is really a proxy for false belief y, which is really a justification for self-serving interest z, then you can expect that when people try to justify false belief x they will produce all kinds of auxiliary defences which support x, y, and z.

Let’s take …. I don’t know……rent controls as an example. Rent controls are often defended as a straightforward way to make housing affordable. Yet this surface belief clearly functions as a proxy for a deeper socialist mindset that wants to believe markets are morally suspect and cannot be trusted to allocate essential goods. Beneath that, in turn, lies a self-serving interest in expanding political control over prices while virtue-signalling compassion at low personal cost.

Another example - climate alarmism commonly presents itself as genuine concern for the planet (also ticking the box for virtue-signalling), but in its more extreme forms it also often operates as a vehicle for the belief that only centralised governance can manage society’s problems. That belief then serves an interest in enlarging the scope, budget, and moral authority of the state, while fostering a sense of belonging for those involved in the cause.

A third example - cancel culture is often justified by the claim that certain speech causes direct harm and therefore must be curtailed. But this claim frequently masks a broader belief that some ideas are illegitimate and should not be heard at all, which itself supports a self-serving interest in status and power through moral gatekeeping. Hence the rapid escalation of rhetoric in which disagreement becomes “hate speech”, offence becomes “harm”, and enforcement is applied selectively to protect the gatekeepers’ own norms.

In all the above cases, you’ll notice too that justifications are offered by depicting challenges as unvirtuous, and they treat the economic and social costs of intervention as negligible or non-existent. At the same time, the short-term psychological benefits (but longer term psychological harm) are that these beliefs and causes stabilise identity, elevates status, and legitimise control to lessen anxiety - while allowing all of this to be experienced as perceived moral virtue. And it should be blindingly obvious now why most politicians jump on board with this – it serves the majority of their interests and conveniently aligns with what much of the electorate believes and seeks comfort in.

It’s much the same with protectionism too (political, economic and intellectual protectionism) - it is commonly defended as a way of saving domestic jobs, and protecting belief systems, yet this belief frequently substitutes for the assumption that exchange of goods, services and ideas is zero-sum and that external gain must imply internal loss. And, of course, that assumption conveniently serves political interests and intellectual grifters tied to protected industries or organisations. And you’ll probably notice too that political, economic and intellectual protectionism all present competition (of goods, services or ideas) as predation rather than cooperation.

You can see this too, of course, in young earth creationism - which is usually expressed as a claim about the age of the Earth based on the hyper literal interpretation of Genesis – but, of course, it frequently acts as a trojan horse for a deeper need for worldly things to remain subordinate to their particular theological reading to assuage fear and insecurity (see here). That, in turn, serves the preservation of group identity, perceived moral and spiritual superiority, and theological and communal authority.

Naturally, we could go on and on with further examples, but suffice to say, I think all the above is an important thing to understand in critical thinking. In each case of false beliefs, the surface belief attracts intense defensive pleading against all reason and evidence because it is psychologically, socially and culturally load-bearing. To abandon it would not merely concede an error; it would threaten the deeper beliefs, identity and interests it surreptitiously supports.

And consequently, to be rescued from false beliefs in the x and y category really means addressing the deeper interests in z that they protect. It requires more than correcting facts or pointing out errors of reasoning or interpretation; it requires lowering the psychological, social, and moral costs of abandoning those beliefs, and offering alternative ways for people to secure identity, meaning, and status without having to defend what is demonstrably false. Because the reality is, until the need for status, power, identity, belonging or moral superiority is met by the proper means - that of truth, competence and authentic virtue - and until the underlying psychological and social payoffs are removed or replaced, the false beliefs that pervade our society will continue to be defended with ever-greater ingenuity, precisely because so much else depends on them.

Why We Cannot Hold God Accountable

 

For years, I held the view that God is morally responsible for the creation story He chose to create. Given presumably an infinite number of possible creation stories He could have chosen, I wondered why He chose one with quite so much suffering in it. I guess, in a C.S. Lewis-esque ‘God in the Dock’ kind of way, I tended to put God “on trial” by judging His creation story by my mere human standards. But about twenty five years ago, I had an epiphany, where I started to develop the kernel of an idea about how absurd it is to even think of our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God in terms of humanly discerned responsibility and accountability. So much so, that I came to realise that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything, but that the reason why is far from obvious.

When we think of human responsibility in terms of right and wrong, and better or worse, we assign value judgements based on various possible scenarios - and if we have high standards, a hypothetical ideal that we bring to bear on the metric. When writing an essay, dealing with a noisy neighbour, or fixing something in the house, we can do a good or bad job, and make the results better or worse according to our efforts and conduct. But that is because everything we do is measured against a standard higher than ourselves, where however well we do, we always fall short of perfection. And the more complex the task, the further from the ideal we end up - a bit like how the bigger the circle we try to draw with a pencil, the less like a perfect circle it looks.

Now, to be clear, I’m not of the school that thinks all genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative. Some philosophers subscribe to this - they contend that greatness is identical to, and exhausted by, intrinsic value. That is, there is no greatness in itself apart from such value, and what is called extrinsic value is merely value derived from intrinsic value. But I reject this, because as far as humans are concerned, it’s clearly not true that an item has extrinsic value only insofar as it contributes to, or realises, something possessing intrinsic value. Some values are fundamentally relational - like, say, loyalty, fairness, courage, responsibility, artistic expression, comedy, hospitality, solidarity, and so forth - and not merely instrumental. To put it in formal mathematical language, even if intrinsic value exists, “greatness” is a multi-dimensional evaluative space rather than a single axis.

I can show further why it’s wrong by applying this to God, but with a caveat that, in actual fact, the proposition that genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative, is much truer of God than it is us. In fact, it’s nearly entirely true of God, but not quite wholly true. To say that God is the greatest possible being is to say that God possesses intrinsic value to the maximal degree permitted by possibility. In other words, God instantiates intrinsic greatness at its logically maximal extent by being the I AM under consideration (Exodus 3:14, John 5:58) - there can be nothing greater than God. But even God, about whom there is no possible increased greatness, has a greatness that is not maximally contained intrinsically; and we can surmise this because we know He desired to create - that is, to express His perfection extrinsically in creation - in order that He could have a loving relationship with His creation. God couldn’t have been maximally manifest or wholly fulfilled in His intrinsic perfection because He desired extrinsic value in terms of loving relationships. Don’t get me wrong, I do think God’s desire to create is itself part of His perfection, and His relationality is not a limitation but an expression of maximal perfection. But it must be true that God + creation is superior to God alone; otherwise, God would have had no reason to create anything at all.

An analogy from physics might help. We could think of intrinsic value like a rest mass: a property something has in itself, independent of external reference frames; and extrinsic value as being like kinetic energy - it exists only relative to interactions or relations; it is not a fundamental property but one that arises from a system’s relation to something else (a frame of reference, a field, a transformation). On this analogy, claiming that a being’s value is entirely intrinsic is like claiming that a particle’s rest mass is its fundamental property, while any additional energies - such as kinetic or potential energy - are purely relational and therefore derivative. And when applied to God, the analogy suggests that calling God the greatest possible Being is akin to saying that, if a particle possessed the highest rest mass permitted by physical law, that intrinsic property would define its fundamental status, with all other forms of energy remaining secondary and relational.

Perhaps now you can see what I mean by saying that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything. Jack is morally responsible if he chooses to commit a bad act instead of a good one, or does a bad job rewiring the house because he chose to get drunk, because he had better options available to him, and better versions of himself that could have conducted those decisions. But our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God cannot do anything better, and has no higher intrinsic or extrinsic state He can manifest. So, therefore, He cannot be responsible for something He cannot possibly be or enact, and He cannot possibly be or enact anything that is not good or perfect. 

You may say that in attributing goodness and perfection to God through my human-centric lens I am making a value judgement and assigning some kind of positive responsibility, but only insofar as I am projecting human standards onto a Being for whom such standards simply do not apply in quite the way a human can understand. It’s perhaps a bit like how a dog can discern a happy marriage from an unhappy one, but could only import crude canine speculation about the nature of deep love between beloveds.

God cannot be morally responsible for who He is, and who He is, is perfection, under which He has maximal compulsion to do the greatest things, even if by our human standards we might foolishly dwell in the illusion that we are equipped to act as judge. The accused stands above indictment, and the plaintiff lacks standing to bring a case.

On Alton Towers & Neurodivergent Queues

 

On this news item making the headlines - depending on the scenario, allowing/disallowing people with invisible disabilities to jump/not jump the queue has an obvious information problem in economics, namely: 

1)         Those who don’t really need to jump the queue but will do so anyway.

2)         Those who do really need to jump the queue but now can’t.

Even if we overlook a further issue – that there are people who potentially suffer more in queues that don’t get to skip the queue – this is still a classic economics problem of how to allocate scarce resources optimally when demand exceeds supply. As regular readers will know, there is nothing better than the market price system to allocate resources efficiently – so here we’d need a price system mechanism that also enables fairness and transparency alongside efficiency.

In a previous post some years ago, I warned of the dangers of demand inflation with increased blue badge allocation - that is, when more people qualify or apply than the system (in this case, parking spaces) can efficiently serve. What’s strange about demand inflation problems is that they are so obvious, easy to understand, and so predictable that it’s strange that the policymakers either totally ignore the trade offs, or act as though the problem won’t materialise. The man with a chronic lung condition who can’t find a parking space in the town centre because the eligibility increased criteria prioritised a less severe need has reasonable grounds to be aggrieved. Similarly, a policy like the above means that priority queues become overcrowded, and wait times rise for disabled guests themselves, thereby increasing the chances that more severely disabled people wait even longer. Because the system doesn’t price in different disabilities (as far as I know), the problems that arise become a predictable outcome of non-priced allocation under rising demand, just as they would if the items in question were bananas, coffee or laptops.

Given that any market-based mechanism would ideally balance three goals for this case: efficiency (optimal waiting times), equity (prioritising greatest need), and legitimacy (public perception of fairness), I’ve thought of three potential solutions, but they are all likely to disappoint one group. 

1)         Differential pricing for priority access: that is, a sliding-scale pricing depending on demand levels, which depends on severity of disability. Prices would act as signals that encourage only those who truly need or value priority access to use it at peak times.

2)         Market-compatible subsidies, such as means-tested disability credits.

3)         Time slots in queues: that is, instead of unlimited queue access, visitors could select ride time slots. When time slots are scarce, small tradeable allocations could allow flexibility and reduce congestion in peak queue times.

I think, given this is a difficult problem, those 3 options are probably the best I can come up with. But….there are significant issues with all 3. The main issue with differential pricing is that tying queue access to prices or severity risks appearing to monetise disability, and may disadvantage genuinely vulnerable people who are less able or willing to pay. The main issue with the market-compatible subsidies is that means-testing and credit systems introduce administrative complexity, and someone has to pick up the cost of that. And the main issue with time-slot allocations is that they impose spillover costs on non-disabled customers and on the business owners who cannot offer the same level of service as broadly or equitably.

No, I think no solution truly satisfies, because this is a complex Hayekian knowledge problem to solve – and probably impossible to resolve in a Pareto efficient manner (by making no other party worse off) without one or more groups feeling hard done by.

Further reading: The Economics Of Queuing, Booking & Paying

On Adults Engaging With Children

Many adults seem generally comfortable around children, but I observe other adults who look very self-conscious trying to relate to and converse with children. Some of those adults may find it equally difficult conversing with other adults, but some probably find children uniquely difficult to relate to, due to the gulf in age and understanding.

For those people, the writer Rebecca West makes an eloquent observation about children that might help. In one of her novels, she says that children have their adult qualities within them but are handicapped by a humiliating disguise. I wouldn’t take it hyper literally, of course, but it’s a sharp observation about how children’s core temperament contains adult qualities in seed form, and as they grow, their real interior perspective develops at a rate that is constrained by their childlike frame.

This kind of ideation might counsel against patronising children based on what we see on the surface rather than the continuity between who they are and who they are becoming. The essence of the adult is already present, certainly in nascent form; it’s just trapped in a body and social position that can’t express itself fully yet. But children are already equipped with the seeds of adult flaws and the seeds of adult virtues. Perhaps this is why experience tells me that children grow in confidence more quickly, and mature emotionally more steadily, when adults speak to them respectfully and sincerely, as fellow persons rather than caricatures of childhood.

Answered Prayer & Probability

 

A lot of people don't believe that God answers prayers. I will show you why we can be reasonably sure He does. God answering prayers is basically this; a Christian prays for x, x happens, therefore x happened because God answered the prayer. That happens a lot, but this apparent pattern is complicated by two common exceptions: times when a Christian prays for x, and x does not occur; and times when x occurs without anyone praying for it at all.

It is easy to understand why both exceptions occur, though; when a Christian prays for x, and x does not occur, we ought to conclude that x was the wrong prayer or not aligned with God's will. And x occurring without anyone praying for it at all does not tell us anything much about whether God answers prayers, any more than a fair coin landing heads tells us whether coins in general are biased.

A more appropriate way to affirm that God answers prayers is to look at what is being prayed for, and ask what the likelihood of the event is anyway without the prayer. For example, suppose Jack has a deck of cards, and prays that, after shuffling them, he will draw the king of diamonds. Since there are 52 cards in the deck, there is a 1 in 52 probability of this happening by chance alone. If 52 independent people were each to pray that they would draw the king of diamonds from their shuffled deck, probability suggests that, on average, one of them would succeed and might therefore conclude that their prayer had been answered.

What we are therefore looking for, in order to justify belief in answered prayer, is to consider events that occur where there is an astronomically low probability that it would happen by chance, but which are specifically and unambiguously prayed for in advance. This requirement precludes cases in which low-probability events are later interpreted as answers to prayer simply because they happened to occur, and excludes low-probability events that do in fact occur by chance, but lack any prior, specific prayer corresponding to them.

At this point, the sheer weight of Christian testimony should be ample evidence that God answers prayers - the kind of prayers which significantly undermine objections such as 'it is only anecdotal testimony' or 'there is no medical verification'. I have been instantly healed a few times immediately after prayer - from a pulled muscle in my leg, and from a chronic tooth pain - and I have witnessed a blind person given their sight back immediately after prayer, a severely deformed leg twist around, grow and be restored immediately after prayer, and a lady crippled and confined to a wheelchair all her adult life stand up and walk immediately after prayer. And they are merely a few experiential drops in a sea of miraculous testimony amassed worldwide.

The likelihood of any one of those events happening by chance is astronomically low, so the likelihood of any one of those events happening by chance immediately after prayer is even lower (for obvious reasons). Therefore, the most likely explanation is that these immediate healings were answers to prayer - especially when these events are considered cumulatively. If the likelihood of an instant healing is almost zero and it happens straight after prayer, the best explanation is the prayer caused it to happen. If the same thing repeats five times in just my experience, the best explanation being answered prayer becomes cumulatively stronger. When this pattern is multiplied across the experiences of Christians more broadly, answers to prayer become so much more plausible that it would be difficult to dismiss without adopting an unjustified scepticism.

 

EDIT TO ADD:

A friend asked about why miracles aren’t more attested to in terms of medical statistics.

My comment: Let me start with a question for you; even if we simply focus on the prayer examples I outlined - to keep it concrete and less abstract – I wonder why you focused not on them but on the proposition that if prayer worked like a predictable medical intervention that it would yield statistical differences in population health data. Please don’t misunderstand, I understand the appetite to broaden it to a wider empirical investigation, but if one is faced with gold standard evidence with 5 evident miracles, then a lack of consistent, predictable formal medical outcomes is not adequate to undermine it by itself.

I agree with your point that prayer and belief in God can enhance outcomes through psychological and community engagement – and given the truth of Christianity, one could reasonably expect that any behaviours that align with His truth can be expected to enhance well-being and utility.  But most Christians understand that prayer is about relationship with God Himself, and is therefore unlikely to be friendly to statistical analyses when treated too mechanically. God is not a God who likes to be tested as though He has something to prove – especially if one doesn’t approach Him with humility (not saying you lack humility). Once one is in a relationship with Him, and gets to experience the power of His love, grace and what He can do for us, those kinds of empirical probing can only fail to enchant. A bit like if a bodybuilder has shown us he can bench press 200kg, investigations about whether he can curl two 5kg pink dumbbells seem quite remiss.

Incidentally, I don’t think you’re being closed-minded or churlish at all - you’re attempting to apply a consistent standard of evidence, which is the very bedrock of empirical investigation. And it remains an interesting question about how some truthful phenomena manifest primarily through population-level statistics and how some operate more at the level of cumulative testimony. But as I’ve argued in other articles, the cumulative testimony in favour of Christianity is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for its truth. 

Where to Find Me - and What’s What

 

I’m now publishing across several platforms, and in case it’s helpful, here’s a brief guide to where to find what I write and record - and how each space is likely to develop going forward. As I think about building platforms alongside my books, there are three main places to connect with my work:

The Philosophical Muser (blog)
This is where I publish longer-form essays and reflections - public reasoning on faith, culture, economics, truth, and the ideas shaping our shared life. Over time, I expect to migrate some of my energy away from the blog and towards the two subscription-based platforms below. That said, The Philosophical Muser consistently receives between 30,000 and 50,000 views each month, so it will remain an important archive, alongside occasional new pieces to keep it alive.

Dear Treasured You (Substack)
This space is shorter, more personal, and more reflective - a sister project to my book of the same name. It takes the form of a series of letters offering wisdom, encouragement, and hard-won insights for the road ahead. My hope is that Dear Treasured You helps people feel more treasured, more loved, and more inspired to fulfil their potential, and this is the platform I’m especially keen to grow.

YouTube - The Philosophical Muser
This is where ideas are explored out loud: longer talks, short reflections, philosophical and theological musings, guest conversations, and discussions on psychology, culture, and the life of the mind. It’s a space for thinking in public and in company, and one I plan to develop further over time.

Wherever you choose to read or listen, thank you for being part of my adventure. 😊