Would You Get Rid Of Discrimination If You Could?

Have you ever stopped to consider why it is that an Irish bar owner can be hauled before the authorities for refusing to serve Germans in his bar due to his being anti-German, but a German customer can’t be hauled before the authorities for refusing to drink in a bar run by an Irishman due to his being anti-Irish (you can substitute ‘Irish’ and ‘German’ for any nationalities you like)?. Or to use a real life example in the UK in 2010, have you ever stopped to consider why it is that a Christian couple running a Bed and Breakfast can be hauled before the authorities for refusing to rent a room to a homosexual couple, but a couple refusing to stay in a Bed and Breakfast because it is run by two homosexuals can’t be hauled before the authorities?  I think on first inspection you’re going to think the answer is obvious, but on closer inspection it won’t be so obvious. 

I find it is something that doesn't get enough attention in the world; An Irish man running a bar can get in trouble for refusing to serve a German on grounds of being anti-German; yet a German man won't get in trouble for refusing to drink in an Irish man's pub on grounds of being anti-Irish.  Both men are guilty of exactly the same level of discrimination, but the authorities are only interested in, or capable of, punishing one of the offenders.  We can say the discrimination is equally bad on both sides, but circumstances force us to respond to them differently.  I wonder how much we want to do things differently, or whether easy options are better, as we so often lack the courage to be better versions of ourselves.  Consider how absurd it would be if two thefts occurred on Saturday afternoon, and the Police declared that only one of the offences was a theft because they had no hope of catching the other offender.  Or consider the indignation if two men, Joseph the paid accountant and Tommy the voluntary youth worker, each committed a theft independently, but the State declared that only Joseph’s act was a theft because he is the only one in paid employment.  The reason our reaction would be one of shock is that we don’t think the crime of theft depends on the police’s chances of catching the offender or on what kind of job the offender has. 

But notice this is precisely what the State does with discrimination.  An Irish man running a bar can get in trouble for refusing to serve a German on grounds of being anti-German because in running a business he is forced to comply with anti-discrimination laws, and because the authorities know that any policy he adopted that precluded Germans from his bar would be easily scrutinised by the authorities.  Conversely, when a German man refuses to drink in an Irish man's pub on grounds of being anti-Irish, he operates under a different radar – one in which he is free as a customer to be as discriminatory as he likes, with virtually no chance of being found out.  Clearly, just like the theft examples, I don’t think anyone is saying that they endorse a different feeling for the two kinds of discrimination, only that they are forced to view them differently in the eyes of the law because they only have a hope of catching one kind of discriminator – the one who runs a business.  

Let’s turn for a moment to the real life event that occurred in 2010 when a Christian couple running a Bed and Breakfast were hauled before the authorities for refusing to rent a room to a homosexual couple.  The problem we have in trying to answer the ‘Bed and Breakfast proprietors/homosexual customers’ problem is that there is no general assertion that we can make to cover all the nuanced particulars attached to this situation (and others like it).  We want to say that anyone who runs a Bed and Breakfast is morally compelled to rent out to everyone without unfair discrimination – but I can see no general grounds on which that kind of particularity can hold.  Is there a general moral compulsion for everyone in the country to rent out rooms to paying customers?  Clearly not, and most of us are not providing this service to anyone, so there is no general rule here.  And equally there is no general rule that says all discrimination is wrong, because humans discriminate in a number of ways – many of which are healthy and beneficial.  So given the foregoing, I don’t see how the homophobic Christian couple running a Bed and Breakfast can be indicted from any general principle – because to do so would require a general moral compulsion either to rent out rooms to people, or to never discriminate, and there are no grounds on which these apply.

Of course, despite our not having a general aversion to all kinds of discrimination, no one needs telling that there are many instances of discrimination that we do find unfair.  I think in spite of what we’ve said above, most of us are appalled when we read about the Bed and Breakfast proprietors’ conduct. So given that some discrimination is good, and some is bad, it might help if we consider some examples of how discrimination occurs in everyday life.

On how we discriminate

Here’s a good kind of discrimination.  Suppose you live on an island consisting of two tribes of people – Tribe A and Tribe B.  Statistics show that on an annual basis, 97% of the crime on the island is committed by people in Tribe A.  If you were thinking clearly, I don’t think you would want the police to focus their attention evenly by targeting 50% of people from Tribe A and 50% from Tribe B.  If you did you would be grossly ignorant of prudent police procedures – which is to say that it is much better that police target people who are statistically more likely to be criminals.  Clearly, it is better to target people in Tribe A, so it is necessary to discriminate (see this Blog post of mine for more of an elaboration on this point).

There are other examples of discrimination. Sellers in business raise prices to target customers that have less price-sensitivity, and slash prices to target bargain hunters that are more price-sensitive.  Also, you can say that student and pensioner discounts are targeted special offers, but you could also say that technically speaking those offers discriminate against people that are not students or pensioners.  Lastly, prospective employers discriminate against prospective employees for all kinds of reasons, such as having the wrong sounding name, the length of unemployment, and physical (un)attractiveness, to name but three. 

There are plenty of surreptitious kinds of discrimination too that occur largely unnoticed.  I have a friend who went on The Weakest Link (a quiz show in which contestants have to vote of the perceived weakest player), and he explained how much more intense it is in front of live cameras.  Given the intensity of the pressure, I suggested that contestants relied more on instincts, and that groups like ethnic minorities or the elderly might find themselves discriminated against (albeit, on many occasions, subliminally) on a show like that, if contestants felt them to be less competent.  My guess is that if you analysed the show's history, recording the exit stages of ethnic minorities and the elderly, you'd find that the Gaussian bell curve is at its steepest in the early rounds.  The point is, discrimination isn’t all bad or unfair – it is a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly (and the surreptitious).   

What’s been shown is that there is no general rule that offers a sound blanket condemnation of discrimination – because some of those examples show how necessary discrimination is.  I think if the truth be known, what most of us really object to is unfair discrimination based on personal things beyond one’s control; things like age, gender, skin colour, nationality, ethnicity and sexual orientation.  Hence we think we can offer a good general moral compulsion from which we could derive the particulars - “There is a particular imperative not to unfairly discriminate against age, gender, skin colour, nationality, ethnicity and sexual orientation” – so if you run a Bed and Breakfast or a bar, one can derive from that general maxim that any particular act of unfair discrimination is wrong.  

But the trouble is, even that doesn’t help as much as we’d like.  Who is to say what constitutes fair and unfair discrimination in the case of, say, age?  Is it discrimination if a supermarket refuses to sell a 17 year old a bottle of beer?  You may say it is not discrimination because such a transaction is against the law, but that then leads to the question – is the law an unfair discriminatory law in itself?  Does the law unfairly discriminate against 17 year olds, when the legal drinking age could be lowered to 17 or 16? 

Let’s take gender too.  Some nightclubs have a tacit policy that if there are already too many men in the club doormen outside discriminate based on gender when they refuse men entry because the club owners want more women in the club.  But I don’t think there are many doormen being hauled before the authorities.  Club owners know that too many men in a club will on average return less profit than a club with a good mix of males and females – so they discriminate by asking the doormen to artificially catalyse the right balance to maximise profit.  Is that unfair discrimination? Perhaps – but it might be a form of discrimination that benefits the clubbing experience for both the men and women. 

Let’s also take geographical discrimination.  Almost all countries put in place a restriction on immigrants entering the country, and most people support a limit on immigration (they just disagree on what the limit should be).  Restrictions on immigration are worse for the economy (in terms of wage loss) than racial and sexual discrimination.  Migrants from poorer parts of the world are looking to work in more prosperous countries to bolster their earnings – that much is self-evident.  By endorsing a cap, people in relatively prosperous places like the UK and USA willingly disregard these gains by wishing to restrict the number of people allowed to take advantage of this prosperity.  As I've said repeatedly in other Blogs, there really is no justification for unfairly discriminating against someone based on nationality, just as there are no grounds for unfairly discriminating against someone based on skin colour, gender or ethnicity.  

Yet we discriminate on nationality and impose huge costs on those who happen to be on the much poorer sides of the border. When the foolish Government ministers encouraged us in the UK to 'Buy British' they did something that was not only morally questionable, but also economically incompetent.  It is morally questionable because when you encourage Brits to 'Buy British' you are at the same time encouraging them to discriminate against others based on nationality.  In case it’s not clear why, history shows us that when a large or powerful group discriminates against a small or powerless group then in terms of suffering it is usually markedly worse than when a small or powerless group discriminates against a large or powerful group.  A case in point; all the non-Brits in the world could more easily do without British products and services than Brits could do without products and services from non-Brits, which also rather proves the point about the self-harming effect of nationalistic discrimination.

Given the foregoing, the upshot is this; suppose we pretend for the sake of argument that we could all agree on what constitutes fair and unfair discrimination - we still would find it near-impossible to punish all kinds of discrimination, because there is so much of it at the heart of who we are, and because in many cases it is practically difficult to employ any punitive measures.  Take the Bed and Breakfast case as a fine example; having agreed (I hope) that unfair discrimination against prospective homosexual customers is to be frowned upon, and that anti-homosexual clients refusing to stay in a Bed and Breakfast run by a homosexual couple is also to be frowned upon – we’re happy that the Bed & Breakfast proprietors are told that they are not free to refuse customers whose views, sexuality or lifestyle they dislike.  But if we have a homosexual couple running a Bed and Breakfast, and homophobes who don’t want to stay there, it would be a lot harder to prosecute the homophobic proprietors than it would be the homophobic prospective customer(s).  If potential customers disapprove of the Bed & Breakfast proprietors’ views, sexuality or lifestyle they are perfectly free to go to other Bed & Breakfast establishments, whereas if the Bed & Breakfast proprietors’ disapprove of the customers’ views, sexuality or lifestyle, they are not free to refuse them a room without expecting to face charges from the authorities.  Quite simply, one kind of discrimination is being punished, whereas an equally bad discrimination from the other side of the counter is not. 

You may say this is absurd on the grounds that if a couple decides to be Bed & Breakfast proprietors then they have an obligation to adhere to a set of laws exclusive to people who rent out rooms.  But why should one’s occupation make any difference?  Discrimination is discrimination, irrespective of whether you’re a Bed & Breakfast proprietor, a barman, a postman or head of a department in the Treasury.  The real difference, I think, is not in how we feel about discrimination – it’s that we can easily set up laws that stop business owners discriminating against customers, but we can’t easily set up laws that stop customers discriminating against business owners by shopping somewhere else.

A la carte discrimination

While just about everyone dislikes unfair discrimination, the State can only legislate against unfair discrimination in a very limited way - so it prohibits only that which it has the power to do so, and it leaves the rest in the hands of humans, by way of a tacit appeal to human decency.  In other words, not only is it the case that the authorities would find it practically impossible to bring to justice everyone who unfairly discriminates – the very existence of our laws of the land are there because without an incentive people won’t assent to the behaviour we’d like.  The compulsion is a healthy one, but it is healthy because it's a good way to be, not necessarily because people should be forced to do it by the State (although, in the obvious case of rape and theft, I think it is good that it is enforced by law, of course).  What the State does is enforce something that we wish people would do willingly, but don't.  We want everyone to not murder, rape, thieve, and so forth, but not everybody pays attention to our wants, so laws are enforced that prohibit such behaviour.  But the reason human decency comes into it is that law can only deal with an offender after the event.  The law won’t stop you going out and raping someone (I hope your conscience will stop you) – but it will prosecute you afterwards.  What we’re saying here in relation to the above is that the difference between rape and unfair discrimination is that the authorities will seek to prosecute all offenders of rape, but they won’t look to prosecute all offenders of unfair discrimination.  It’s not simply the case that the State thinks rape is more serious than unfair discrimination, because it does look to prosecute some who unfairly discriminate.  It’s more the case that it has no hope of prosecuting a man who refused to stay at a Bed and Breakfast due to the proprietor being homosexual – so a lot of unfair discrimination goes unpunished.  

One last thing to consider, when it comes to the discrimination related to the couple in the Bed and Breakfast or Irish John running a bar – things get more involved when we realise that the supposed costs on society aren’t in economic terms costs at all.  At the beginning I asked you to suppose that Irish John opens a bar and puts up a sign saying he won't serve German people. I also asked you to suppose that a German (let’s call him Peter) walks into the bar and upon hearing John's voice, leaves the premises complaining that he doesn't like the Irish and has no wish to be served by an Irishman.  German Peter has employed the same level of discrimination as Irish John, but Peter gets away without any punitive measures simply because John owns a bar and Peter is only a customer in a bar.  Irish John is being held to a different standard because his discrimination is from the vantage point of a bar owner, whereas Peter’s discrimination is from the vantage point of a bar customer.  The argument to hold John to higher accountability is that John is imposing a cost on society by opening a bar and not serving German people.  While that is true, a broader perspective tells us that not only is anti-German John the bar owner imposing a cost on society, German Pete is imposing a cost on society by not drinking in bars run by people he doesn't like.  Most people realise this, but here’s the economic principle that I’ll wager most people miss; thinking in terms of economics, anyone who doesn't open a bar is imposing a cost on society too.  That’s how you must look at the situation if you are going to consider this properly.  In both cases, the customers do not get served - it's just that at least in John's case many people do get served, whereas in the case of you and me no one is getting served, because neither of us has opened a bar and sold drinks at all. 

If Irish John is imposing a cost on society by opening a bar and serving everyone but Germans, then each of us must be imposing a greater cost on society by not opening a bar and not serving anyone. At the very least, if there's no general moral compulsion to serve people in bars then if not serving Germans is a cost on society, then you, me and Irish John are all equally guilty. It might sound absurd to think in these terms, particularly as your particular occupation confers benefits on society that Irish John's bar does not, but this kind of analysis would be quite natural at a lunch table full of economists. To understand how economics inform us in these everyday matters, one must understand the externalities linked to all actions and events.  For example, on a street full of expensive terraced houses, the actions of one house owner can have subtle effect on the rest of the street.  If Frank in number 34 is the first to have a burglar alarm installed he immediately increases the chances that someone else’s house will be burgled (that’s a negative externality).  If he is the first to have a smoke detector and fireproof walls installed then he decreases the chances that house fires will spread to other houses (that’s a positive externality).

So going back to the bar and Irish John’s discrimination; John's cost to society in the bar world is that he serves every pub customer except German people.  Our cost to society in the bar world is that we don't serve anyone at all.  As well as that, John is actually doing extra good to pub drinkers by supplying pub drinks and thereby bidding down prices at competing pubs (including all the pubs in which German people can get served). 

We want to live in a world in which if you run a business you operate from within the purlieus of anti-discrimination laws.  But we also have seen that there is no justifiable denial of the right to discriminate if you’re a customer.  Some might claim that there ought to be no grounds on which business owners can discriminate against customers because businesses have greater commercial power than customers, and are, as potential employers, operating a stricter standard than those not in businesses.  But that doesn’t really tell us much – it still leaves the question of whether the distinction between employer and employer is significant enough to warrant this difference in discrimination capabilities. 

And even if we say the difference is significant enough, that still needs justifying, along the lines of explaining how one justifiably identifies what qualifies as significant.  Perhaps we feel deep down that the more power, influence or capabilities a person has the more responsibility falls on their shoulders.  But while that might be justified in some cases, that does not seem to help here either.  Tall, good looking men have more power and influence in the dating world, but we wouldn’t wish to impose on them a law that says they must only date German or Irish women.  Equally, employers get to discriminate all the time without any recourse to punitive measures.  For example, the poor could be classed as being discriminated against when clothes shops sell expensive shirts that are way beyond the price range of low earners.  So there is not much mileage here.  I have a feeling that although Governments would like to punish anyone discriminating on grounds of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation, they face different situations between those in the employment or selling market and those that are not.  If Peter chooses to drink in another bar because he doesn’t like the Irish then no one need be any the wiser, and he could easily think up another excuse for not drinking.  But a bar owner who refuses to serve Germans would have a more difficult time explaining that policy to the authorities.  

Due to this asymmetry I still don’t think we have satisfactorily resolved the inconsistency of our dealings with discrimination, except to say that we do view the discriminations as equally bad, it's just that the law only enables certain restricted courses of action.  Because of this, I will offer a thought experiment.  Suppose if it were possible - and this possibility remained only in the sphere of our unfair discrimination - a supercomputer could read all our unfair discriminations thanks to a tiny microchip inside our cranium, and remove £25 from our bank account every time we were consciously racist, xenophobic, homophobic, etc, and acted upon those thoughts - would you support it? I'm undecided on this microchip option myself - it would be a more extreme version of what we already have - incentives not to commit crimes, except in this case the measure is extreme enough to match the difficulty in conviction.  It sounds restrictive, but don't forget, once upon a time in certain parts of the world a law against racism would have struck some people as restrictive, and absurd and repressive too.

As a friend of mine gave an honest admission that I think we all share - "At times I am consciously all three - racist, xenophobic and homophobic – but I don't choose to feel that way, and after thinking about it, I realise how irrational my thoughts have been.”

Yes this is a problem, and my friend raises a good point, because despite our efforts not to be racist, xenophobic and homophobic, psychologists have shown that evolution has dealt us a hand that contains some racist, xenophobic and homophobic propensities - so the microchip might be too much.  That said, if £25 keeps disappearing from our savings every time we are racist, xenophobic and homophobic, we'd soon master the art of controlling it and perhaps exchanging it for tolerance and kindness. While this sounds like a violation of civil liberties, it is important to remember that the microchip is not interfering with your free choice, at least no more than a law is - it is merely punishing a bad action after the decision has been made (just like a law does). The only difference is that this microchip is getting to the parts that other laws can't reach. Remember too the monitoring system only removes £25 when it has measured a conscious, deliberate discriminatory thought and clocked that you acted on those thoughts. So if you think about the German anti-Irish pub customer - if he suppresses his discrimination and instead chooses tolerance and kindness he's ok, but if we walks out due to his discrimination he is £25 poorer.  Clearly here, the fines would have to be relative to wealth and earnings – a £25 fine for a man worth £25 million wouldn’t be much of an incentive.

Clearly this would throw up all sorts of corollary questions; what about people with split personalities, or people on medication, or people with emotional damage due to war?  But for this thought experiment we must assume that the supercomputer can pick up all these nuanced distinctions and distribute maximal leniency when required.  Remember a thought experiment like this is designed hypothetically to ask a fairly specific question - would we benefit from stronger incentives not to be racist, xenophobic, homophobic? It is this on which we should base our judgement.

I suppose the best solution when such a technology is readily available and easy to implement would be to act according to our democratic framework and ask the citizens of the country to vote on whether or not they support microchips that respond to discrimination by way of a fine. If they support it then we can at least be assured that they value the gradual diminution of unfair discrimination over the lessening of our abilities to be privately discriminatory.  My guess is that most will be overwhelmingly against it.

* Photos courtesy of www.humanrightseurope.org 

Why I Support Something I Think Is Unfair

The big problem I have with taxation is that I don’t think it is intrinsically fair that the rich should be taxed at a higher rate than the poor.  But yet at the same time I think it is good for society if they are, and for that reason, I do support the State policy that the rich are taxed at a higher rate, even though I think it is unfair on rich people.  Why is it good for society if the rich are taxed at what is ostensibly an unfair rate?  First, I must explain why I think it is intrinsically unfair. 

I’ll offer a fable to show the absurdity of the assumptions that anyone should automatically assume that the rich should be taxed at a higher rate.  I didn't invent this; it's based on one of Aesop's Fables about assiduousness, but I've developed it for what is going to be a Tom, Dick and Harry consideration in relation to taxation. A long time ago, in a more primitive pre-parliamentary society, Tom, Dick and Harry find themselves washed up on an island with turbulent weather seasons.  Tom decides to be diligent and spends his time mastering tool-sharpening, carpentry and the ability to obtain and store large quantities of food.  Tom spends the first few months building himself a robust wooden house supported by skilfully crafted foundations, and works hard to collect and store plenty of food for the duration of the turbulent season   Dick and Harry, on the other hand, decide to take it easy; they laze about in the sun for weeks on end, eating only the low-hanging fruit and the berries within easy reach. 

When the turbulent season comes, Tom is safely tucked up in his robust wooden house with all the food he needs.  Dick and Harry badly need somewhere to shelter for the season, as they are going to be exposed to the storms and locked in a struggle to acquire enough food to eat.    Now here’s the rub; I don't think anyone would mind if Tom decided to be graceful and generous and offered Dick and Harry a place to stay and a share of the food.  But I don't think it would be good if Dick and Harry insisted it was their right to stay at Tom's and have some of his food - after all, at the start of play Tom, Dick and Harry each had the same opportunities - they just decided to take different paths.  The moral of the story is there is no general imperative for rich Tom to support poor Dick and Harry, but he would be kind and decent if he did so, so long as he did so without encouraging them to be workshy or parasitic.   

That's a pretty good template for society in the UK as a rule; while not everyone has the same abilities and state of health, we mostly choose our own academic and career paths, with the marketplace rewarding those who work hard to obtain high levels of learning and mental acuity, specialised skills, and durably beneficial and enriching training.  Hence, we’d expect to see exactly what we do see; a diverse society comprising of high, middle and low earners, with some on welfare, and a broad variety of talents, abilities, skills and qualifications right across the societal spectrum.  Now, although I’ve shown why I think it is not good to naturally assume the rich should pay a higher tax rate than the poor (for further analysis of this, see my Blog post here)– I can, I think, show why despite this unfairness, the system of higher tax rates for the rich is one we should support.  The key, I think, is supporting it for the right reasons. 

To make the point clearer, let’s pretend for a moment that all taxes go towards making the world a better place.  There is more than enough money and food to go around the entire world – enough to see that no one is desperately hungry, thirsty and economically impoverished.  The problem is that the vast majority of that money is sitting in rich people’s banks.  Suppose through a magic spell everyone suddenly became super decent and generous with their money, with a sudden mindfulness to help those worse off than themselves – what you’d see is a mass emptying of bank accounts so that the money supply was distributed a bit more equitably, putting an end to this great chasm of wealth, and alleviating so many of the world’s impoverishment problems.  Through compulsory taxation the Government takes a portion of what ideally, in a perfect world, we’d all give according to others’ needs.  Most people don’t do this voluntarily, so they do it involuntarily through taxation, where the rich are taxed at a higher percentage rate than the poor – except of course that the State cannot just take everything it needs from the rich to sort out the world’s problems, because it would create a mass disincentive to earners, which is why we have such a wealth gap. 

So even though I can’t find any justifiable assumption that the rich should automatically pay a higher rate of tax, I think it would be much nicer if all the higher earners were glad and happy to give money to those less fortunate – so I do support the higher rate for the rich, solely on the grounds that I think the world would be a much better place if they gave away their money voluntarily – and that it is no bad thing if the State can help engender through compulsory taxation the actions we should be doing voluntarily out of human kindness and decency. 

In the real world, not all taxes go towards making the world a better place – but some of it does go towards foreign aid, and much of it is spent on making our country a better place, with funds provided for necessary services, such as health, education, social services, welfare, and environment, planning and transportation.  So even though the tax isn’t all going towards alleviating the world’s problems, it is at least spent on some useful things – and that is why I support a higher rate of tax for the rich, despite thinking it is unfair.  The same principle as above applies here; it’s just that it is being considered on a smaller scale.  In order to provide the citizens of this country with what they need, the Government takes through compulsory taxation a portion of what ideally, in an ideal world, we’d all give according to others’ needs. 

The Best Sitcom In The World?

Of all the genres, comedy is perhaps the hardest thing to write.  What I mean is, as much skill as it takes to write dramas, tragedies, thrillers, romances and so forth (and it takes a lot), the one advantage the writer has in choosing those genres over comedy is that those genres more easily express their quality with the intrinsic nature of the story.  For example, if you're writing a tragedy about the death of a child in a family, one thing in your favour is that the occurrence of death naturally devastates those engaged in the plot, so at least some of your work is done for you, because child death is a tragic thing, and most of us can elicit evocation of empathy as we share in each other's suffering.  Similarly, strong love between two beloveds is a wonderful thing, and a woman being stalked by a serial killer is a chilling thing, so, again, some of your work is done for you if you're writing a romance or thriller. 

Needless to say, it is easy to write a really bad tragedy, romance or thriller - and given the incommensurable number of unsuccessful efforts, and the number of industrial-scale production line paperbacks, compared with the number of critical successes, it's probable that the majority of efforts veer more towards being 'bad' than they do 'good'.

No doubt the same is true of comedy - except when it comes to the writing of comedy, we have a slightly different situation to the aforementioned tragedies, romances or thrillers - because when setting out to write a comedy almost every scene or plot won't naturally be funny or witty - the writer must construct the right setting, plot and (in particular) the right dialogue to make things funny, as well as choose the right actors to deliver those lines.  Even a brilliant script and a cracking plot can suffer if the performers are not suited to the material.  We all know how discomforting it is to be in a room or a theatre or a comedy club in the presence of someone trying desperately hard but failing to be funny.

So in my view, of all the genres, the hardest thing to write is comedy, and I think the best comedy has been produced by the team that gave us Seinfeld (Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld) - and who, to an arguably slightly lesser extent, also mirrored that brilliance with Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry David solo).  Seinfeld takes us on a journey over 9 seasons, which centrally focuses on the adventures of four friends; Jerry Seinfeld playing himself, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and the irrepressible Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards). 

What puts Seinfeld above all other sitcoms, for me, is that it raised the bar of situation comedy to a new level, with its acute observations of human idiosyncrasies, its aphoristic considerations of social intercourse, and the variety of the subject matters explored - all delivered at a consistently brilliant level by a selection of some of the finest writers in the business. The main brilliance of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm is that each episode is littered with punchy phrases about people and social situations that you've felt all along are accurate, but have always been too courteous or reticent to say out loud.  In short, these guys say what most of us are thinking, and what most of us would say if ordinary social protocols were suspended for a time.

With sitcoms like Seinfeld, and the nearly equally brilliant Frasier, we have comedies that don't compare easily to the brilliant sitcoms Britain has produced, because with the great British sitcoms like Yes Minister, Porridge, The Office, and so forth, there are usually only one or two writers throughout, producing six or so episodes per series.  In contrast, the teams behind Seinfeld and Frasier had numerous scripts from which to choose, from a multitude of talented writers, meaning that each season usually consists of over 20 episodes, with just about every episode as sharp, fresh, witty and fast-paced as the rest.  For that reason, and because I think in George, Kramer and Elaine, Seinfeld gave us three of the best characters in sitcom history, Seinfeld stands as the best of all. 

Furthermore, with the subsequent brilliance of Curb Your Enthusiasm after Seinfeld went off the air, I'd put Larry David up there as being one of the most talented observers of comedic situations we have ever seen.  In fact, I'd say Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld and to situation comedy as William Shakespeare is to playwriting, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder and Woody Allen are to comedy filmmaking, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse are to literary comedy, Adam Smith is to economics, Newton, Darwin and Einstein are to science, Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are to classical music, The Beatles are to pop music, and Jimi Hendrix is to guitar playing.   

* Photos courtesy of www.fanpop.com

The Economics of an 'All You Can Eat' Buffet

 

Last Sunday I went with some friends to a Chinese ‘all you can eat’ buffet.  Once upon a time few, if any, thought such a concept could work, due to the problem of asymmetrical information (bear with me, I’ll explain).  But not only do Chinese ‘all you can eat’ buffets work, they are very successful.  About ten years ago I suggested to some friends that we should invest in Norwich’s first ‘all you can eat’ Indian buffet, because we’d make a healthy profit from it.  I knew with near-certainty that if we introduced one it would be a huge success.  Guess what?  My friends didn’t go for it, and later someone else did, and it’s now one of the most successful Indian restaurants in Norwich (if not the most successful). 

The problem of asymmetrical information is basically that the seller does not have enough information about the buyer to obtain an optimum price.  Car insurance is a good example; your car insurance company doesn’t know enough about you and your driving habits to obtain the optimal premium, so they assign a probability estimate based on a model that risk aversion is often commensurably correlated with low risk.  In other words, profits and losses are balanced out by the fact that the safest drivers happen to be those who have the most favourable cars, age, driving history, and hence, the lowest expected costs.

The problem of asymmetrical information for the Chinese ‘all you can eat’ buffet owner is that he doesn’t know whether his next customer is going to be a 25 stone man who can eat food twice the value of the dining price, or whether his next customer is going to be a 7 stone lady who can only eat food two-thirds of the value of the dining price.  Obviously, for ‘all you can eat’ buffets to be successful for the owners, the average amount of food consumed by all the customers must remain below the dining price, otherwise the restaurant will operate at a loss, and soon go out of business.  If the dining price is £8 per person, then those who can eat £10 worth of food would find it very worthwhile, but those who can only eat £6 worth of food would find it less worthwhile.

Purely on economic grounds, what should happen is that those who can only eat £6 worth of food would no longer dine there, leaving only those for whom the dining experience is a net gain.  But that couldn’t carry on, because the restaurant would then have to raise their prices up again to return a profit.  Then the smaller eaters would drop off (because the new prices are no longer a net gain for them), leaving only those even bigger eaters for whom the dining experience is a net gain.  And we repeat the process – the prices go up, more drop out, again and again, until the logical outcome is that the restaurant charges £30 (or something like that) and is only frequented by huge eaters consuming exactly £30 worth of food. 

That’s the prediction on paper, but of course, it suffers from a fatal flaw – there is more to the dining experience than consideration of consumption vs. price – particularly considering that all restaurants operate on a policy that the customers pay more for the meal than the value of consumption to the restaurant.  This is why I like Chinese buffets – we have a situation where just about everyone wins; for the restaurant, the average amount of food consumed by all the customers remains below the dining price, there is a good deal for the customers who can consume more than the value of the dining price, and even those who consume under the dining price have benefits that make the experience worth their while.  Those small consumers (this also applies to the big consumers) do not have to wait for the order to be taken and the food to be cooked, they get to eat a larger variety of food than a single dish served in a standard restaurant, and they have the option of consuming more than usual if they had underestimated their hunger.

All you can eat buffets are great little ventures, because society is full of people who love quantity over quality eating; it is full of people for whom an all-you-can-eat dining price of £8 seems like a better deal than £8 for a single dish at a standard restaurant; and it ideally caters for the numerous people who once in a while prefer the good value quantity over quality option.  All of the above is enough to see to it that the restaurant will consistently make a profit on its average customer, as they far outweigh (not literally of course) the huge eaters. 

Damn, if only we’d have started that Indian ‘all you can eat’ buffet ten years ago!

On Marriage, Civil Partnerships & Polygamy

On Sunday the BBC’s The Big Questions featured a debate about heterosexual civil partnerships, and why they should be the next step in legislation.  The logic is straightforward – if gay couples shouldn’t be discriminated against by being excluded from the right to marry, then heterosexual couples shouldn’t be discriminated against by being excluded from the right to be in a civil partnership.  No problem there, with a system that includes both marriage and civil partnerships for anyone that wants them (whether gay, straight, religious or non-religious), everyone’s preferences are catered for. 

Give it a few decades - once this has become the cultural norm - and I predict that gay people will choose marriage or a civil partnership depending on their religious beliefs (or lack thereof), and more and more heterosexual non-religious couples will choose a civil partnership over marriage in church, making church marriages predominantly favoured by religious people.  Everyone will be able to have a formal union with their beloved based on their beliefs and preferences – and that can only be a good thing. 

One contributor on the show, a woman from Catholic voices, objected that if we let it get that far then you’ll have people campaigning for polygamy to be legal, and goodness knows what else.  Yes it is true that that future populations may well be into things that we at present would find extreme and unlikely (don’t forget gay marriage would have seemed extreme and unlikely to our progenitors) – I hear polyamory (having multiple sexual relationships by mutual consent) is on the increase.  But I think she is wrong in fearing that we’ll one day be rooting for polygamy.  Here’s what she's missing.

Most people seem to object to polygamy on the grounds that it is bad for women (particularly given that men would be much more inclined towards multiple wives than women would multiple husbands).  They have a picture of horny men with four or five wives at their disposal, all feeling threatened and jealous of the other wives, bringing about mass insecurity and a diminishing of the traditional family unit.  This is true – but it misses a key point – polygamy is bad for women, but it is bad for men too.  It isn’t just bad for men and women because most individuals prefer to have one beloved and be in a monogamous relationship – it is bad because in a society in which a lot of men have four or five wives, there will be a lot of lonely and frustrated men with no wives at all.  This means that wives in polygamous marriages will have less reason to be faithful to their husband, because the competition is heightened by the increased number of single men out there.  So not only would you have a society full of threatened, jealous and insecure women, you’d have a society full of threatened, jealous and insecure men too. 

That’s why I think the woman from Catholic voices is wrong – if the vote for the legalisation of polygamy was on the agenda, most men and most women would vote against it.  Even if polygamy became legal, I still think for reasons already alluded to, most individuals would still opt for a monogamous relationship with one beloved.  In that case, you may ask, why not make it legal to cater for the minority that do want to be in a polygamous relationship, and leave the majority to their monogamous preferences?  That can’t do any harm can it – after all, isn’t choice always a good thing?  No, I think sometimes we humans need reining in – and this is one of those times, because I think the option of legalised polygamy would make monogamous couples much less happy and secure. 

The reason is as follows; as far as the law goes, at the moment you and your husband or wife have roughly equal strength on your side; if you are arguing lots, or if you’re going through a bad patch, your marriage is closed to the rest of the community, giving you the capacity to work through it as husband and wife (or as civil partners).  But if polygamy became legal, your husband or wife could leave and marry Alice, Jemma and John down the road – or they could invite Lucy and Kate into your marriage – and this would only increase the tension in marriages (and that’s to say nothing of the increase in legal complications).  That’s why having legalised polygamy as an option is bad, and why, if anything is going to be a preferred alternative to marriage and civil partnerships, I think it will be polyamory not polygamy – with the majority still preferring a monogamous marriage or civil partnership.

How Good Are You At Assessing Evidence?

How good are people at receiving some information and assessing the probabilistic evidence instinctively?  I think people overestimate their ability, as this simple test probably will show.  

In front of you are two fields full of sheep.  Field A has 70 black sheep and 30 white sheep, and Field B has 70 white sheep and 30 black sheep, but you don't know which field is which. You're blindfolded and asked to go into one of the fields and lead 12 sheep out of the gate. You lead out 8 white sheep and 4 black sheep.  From which field is it likely that your selection came, A or B?  I'm guessing you said Field B. You're wise to say Field B, but here's the real question - what percentage of confidence would you say is justifiable in claiming Field B to be a wise estimate?

A) 10%

B) 25%

C) 40%

D) 65%

Remember what you chose.  Now here's another question.  Which of these cities has the distinction of being the world's most populated city?

A) London

B) New York

C) Paris

D) Madrid

Which did you choose?  If you have a good sense of the world populations you would have likely thought 'None of the above' (and your instinct would be right - the actual answer is Shanghai). 

Now returning to the first question - what is the actual answer for the justifiable percentage of confidence in claiming Field B to be a wise choice? - you should have said 'None of the above', because the answer is 98%.  Almost nobody would look at my sheep test and think instinctively that the probability would be that high.  

Here’s something else to consider.  I didn't invent this one - it's a selection task devised by psychologist Peter Wason, to show that people don't naturally think well when logical symbols are required. According to statistics over 90% of you will get this wrong.

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, which must conform to the rule "If  P then Q". That means that whenever there is a card with P on one side, the reverse side of the card must show Q. The visible faces of the cards show as follows:

CARD 1 - P

CARD 2 - not-P

CARD 3 - Q

CARD 4 - not-Q

Wason asks which card(s) must you definitely turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that "If P then Q" holds? Have a think about it for a few seconds. 

If you're one of the 90+% you've probably reasoned that you need card 1 and card 3. You want to make sure that P has a Q on the other side, and equally you want to make sure that Q has a P on the other side.  But that's not right - the cards you need to choose are cards 1 and 4, because the rule is "If P then Q".  So indeed you need to check card 1 (P) to ensure there's a Q on the back, but you also need to check card 4 (not-Q) to ensure there is 'no' P on the back. If there is a P on the other side of card 4, then the rule "If P then Q" has been disobeyed.  Cards 2 and 3 don't need to be touched.

Now what's strange, Wason found, is that although people struggle in this task when using logical symbols, they don't when those symbols are changed to more familiar real life situations, despite the logical connection between facts being exactly the same. For example, if instead of "If P then Q" the rule used is "If you come into my pub and drink alcohol you must be 18 or over" people get that one right. The visible faces of the cards show as follows:

CARD 1 - Age 15

CARD 2 - Drinking coke

CARD 3 - Age 18

CARD 4 - Drinking vodka

When presented with the task in the social context of under age drinking, virtually nobody has any trouble choosing cards 1 and 4, even though the logical connection is exactly the same.

I think a lot of this apparent irrationality is down to the mental shortcuts people take.  At least, one would assume so, given that once things have been explained nobody doubts them any more. It's like Daniel Kahneman's now world famous bat and ball problem:

"A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?"

Almost immediately many people go straight for '10 cents' instead of 'five cents'.

It might also be a case of low hanging fruit. I mean, here's one that's alarmingly obvious that surprisingly some people get wrong. Which of the following is the largest set:

A} The set that contains all words in which the third from last letter is 'i'.
B} The set that contains all words in which the last three letters are 'ing'.

It is obvious that A is the larger set, because set A contains all of set B, but yet not everyone sees it. I think it's because they can easily bring to mind words that end in 'ing' so they somehow fail to assess this correctly.

Here is a further puzzle that's really uncomplicated, but yet it leaves many people giving the wrong answer:

X is looking at Y, but Y is looking at Z. X is married but Z is unmarried. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A} Yes
B} No
C} Cannot be determined

Many people answer C, but that’s not right – the answer is A.  Here’s why.  If Y is married then Y is the married person looking at the unmarried Z. If Y is unmarried then X is the married person looking at the unmarried Y. Either way, you know a married person is looking at an unmarried person.

Try some of these on your friends or work colleagues; you’ll be amazed how often they get their answers wrong.  You’ll also see them admit how obvious the answers were all along, once you’d told them.  I suppose that is the nature of riddles in life; in prospect they often seem tricky, but in retrospect they were obvious all along.  Not only are these puzzles fun – they inform us that we humans are perhaps not as rational and not as instinctively good at assessing probabilistic evidence as we might think.

Natural Selection or The Invisible Hand

Now we've had the funeral of Lady Thatcher, it seems appropriate to say that there has been two extreme reactions to Thatcher's death (and legacy).  Some largely unimaginative people (usually from the north of England) assert that her actions ruined their potential for industrial earnings; and some equally largely unimaginative people (usually from the south of England) have asserted that these economic changes in the eighties were necessary because industry and market economics undergoes a kind of Darwinian natural selection where businesses are driven by a kind of 'survival of the fittest' pattern.  I think both sets of individuals are looking at the situation in an unhelpful way that skews too heavily towards their own emotional, occupational, cultural and, in some cases, national biases. 

In market economics, Smith's 'invisible hand' states that competition brings about self-interest for the good of everyone, where prices near-perfectly match supply and demand.  Biological evolution has no mechanism comparable to this.  In natural selection, biological forms acquire traits that better enable them to adapt to specific environmental situations, which results in their improved evolvability due to the perpetuation of those beneficial traits in the generations that succeed them.

The Darwinian model doesn't ideally apply to the invisible hand mechanism. What extremists have done is compared it to "arms races," where on occasions the encouragement of actions can cause harm to the group but also compromise the advantages for individuals.  This can happen when gains are relative and mutually offsetting - but this is rare in the Smithian model (in fact, if anything, the Smithian model suffers only by being too parsimonious for potential niches in the market).  What’s usually the case, as is with Thatcher’s critics, is that they have missed most of the costs, and mistaken the benefits for costs, by having too narrow a vision in supporting the parts of the economy that are not healthy (which coincidentally, always seem to be the particular industries in which they find themselves).  It's no use being emotionally affiliated to an industrial factory that's costing us money just because it happens to be one’s own, or because it happens to be based in one's own country.  That's as ill-conceived as preferring a car-crash on British roads to safe driving in China or India - the quality of the thing under consideration is important, not where it comes from. 

I explained in my last Blog why enhancing the global connectivity is good for all economies.  The argument that supports this is the same argument that supports why market economics on a global scale is more efficient than the Darwinian natural selection model for economics, and why Thatcher's critics have got it wrong - it is the efficiency of the relationship between prices, supply and demand.  It is foolish and impractical to favour bailing out and propping up industries in Britain, when Britain (and the rest of the world) can benefit more greatly (and has benefited more greatly) from the efficiency of the relationship between prices, supply and demand on a global scale.  As I explained in my last Blog, making good use of the efficiency of the relationship between prices, supply and demand on a global scale is the same as making good use of the efficiency of finding improved technology.  Whenever a Government departs from this mandate by trying to artificially improve industries on the basis that they happen to be 'our national industries' (as the Labour Government of the 1970's tried to do) it only succeeds in diminishing the extent to which opportunities to improve everyone's welfare exists.

What those protesting about loss of British industry don't seem to understand is that competitive markets is what brings about the allocation of resources with maximum efficiency.  There is no place for national identity in economics, because to insist so is to say that the different way to allocate resources is contingent on one's national identity, which is manifestly false.  Adam Smith showed in his seminal Wealth Of Nations that the different ways to allocate resources is only maximised to the best effect when competitive markets function freely (this has also been proven mathematically by Debreu and McKenzie). 

The key here is that there is 'supply'; there is 'demand' for that supply, and there are 'prices' that invoke near-maximum efficiency between the supplies and the demand.  There is not such a near-maximally efficient mechanism in natural selection.  In analogical terms, there is supply and demand in natural selection, and there are prices in natural selection - but there is no 'invisible hand' that maximises biological efficiency in the same way that it maximises global economic efficiency through prices that near-perfectly balance the weight of supply and demand, and the capacity to adapt to the continually changing environment. 

There may be plenty of reasons to criticise Mrs Thatcher – but claiming she ruined our industry is not one of them – because, in fact, the opposite is true; she helped enhance our economy in ways that seemed unlikely in 1979.  To criticise her for that is as foolish as criticising all the people driving safely in China and India because you happen to prefer car crashes in Britain.

On The Evolution Of The Eye

At a discussion group round a friend's house the other night a Christian friend of mine made a comment about the evolution of the eye, doubting whether such a complex and 'well-designed' organism could have arisen through natural selection.

It's true the eye is well designed (although it's far from perfect), and it's also true that eyesight is hugely beneficial to many creatures. But it's not true that that means evolution probably didn't produce it - in fact, it is because eyesight is so beneficial to so many creatures that evolution did bring about the design of eyes over time. Not only did eyesight evolve very slowly over millions of years in stages, the story of eyesight evolution started with something very primitive.

Studies of biology and taxonomy reveal a rich array of organisms alive today that demonstrate the intermediate stages of eyes. We can even sequence their DNA and see which genes give rise to those stages. For example, the first step is something like an amoeba which has a photosensitive area inside it that can detect light. Then evolution brings about a surface patch that improves further the detection of light. Then generations later we find that the surface patch is indented in a cup shape which allows the patch to crudely detect the direction from which the light is coming. So we’ve gone from detection to direction – that’s already an improvement for the organism. 

One can fairly easily imagine some kind of crude skin-form with the kind of accretive layering that could facilitate the emergence of a light-sensitive spot. All that would be needed would be a combination of pigmented cells with light-sensitivity ratcheted onto it, and the formation of translucent cells that could encase the pigmented cells and give the structure a degree of protection. It may well take a few hundred thousand generations for even a crude eye to evolve - but as long as we can conceive of the principle for functional improvement, we can imagine the steps required*. 

Translucent cells subject to mutations would have an index of refraction, because refraction is based on indices where the n of a substance (that is, the optical medium) defines how radiation (in this case, light), propagates through that medium. Once the cells underwent variations in size and density and became more cup-like we would find improved ability to facilitate dispersion, which means varying wavelengths and (in the higher forms) emergence of colour.  Mutations that improve the organism would survive due to evolution's ratchet mechanism, and further improvements would emerge. 

We know quite unequivocally how two light sensitive patches would have evolved, and how tiny improvements in the ability to detect light and then actually discern the movement of a predator or locate food would confer very strong advantages to the organism. 

Later on what’s then facilitated is a strong genetic tendency in the more developed organism for bilateral symmetry (a body divided into a left half and right half). Dividing the organism down the middle from front to back you will find that the two halves are a mirror image of each other on the outside (that’s two sets of legs, two feelers, two sets of fins or something of that kind) – and quite naturally, a pair of photoreceptors or cupped receptors – with this eventually leading to functioning eyes. 

But there is a bigger picture too that mustn't be missed. The eye is but one microcosmic example of the sublime beauty of God's creation through evolution. It truly is a remarkable narrative that every living thing, with such a rich multitude of shapes, sizes and colours - plants, trees, flowers, fruit, vegetables, insects, fish, dinosaurs, lizards, elephants, giraffes, hamsters, whales, sharks, chimpanzees, dogs, cats, lions, tigers and humans - all came about from a common ancestor, and then billions of years of time and adaption. Evolution really is a quite magnificent story of beauty.

* Not only has the eye evolved independently about 40 times - we now have the precise computational facilities to map out a trajectory for the evolution of the eye. This has been done numerous times - most notably by Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger, but on other occasions too.

How To Split A Restaurant Bill

Who pays the restaurant bill?

If you have a meal with nine other people, then your consumption habits probably will depend on how the bill is paid.  If each person pays their share of the bill based on what they consume, then the chances are individuals won’t over consume.  A fairly reliable rule of thumb in economics is that when an individual is able to impose some of the consumption costs on others, he will over-consume relative to a level that is maximally efficient across society.  That’s another way of saying that people respond to incentives, and if there are no incentives against overconsumption, people will over consume.  If each person pays for their own meal, then there is an obvious economic incentive to not over consume.  At the other extreme, if a billionaire Arab tells you he’s going to pay for the entire cost of all your meals then that amounts to ten people’s potential willingness to over consume. 

But what about when the bill is split evenly between the ten people – will the average consumption per person be greater or less than when each person pays for their own meal?  I’m pretty certain that if this were researched you’d find increased consumption when the bill is split evenly.  Here’s why.  Suppose you’ve all finished your main meal, and as a group of ten you are now pondering whether to have a dessert, where all desserts are £4 each.  If you have a dessert, and you’re the only one, then that dessert has only cost you 40p, because the £4 is going to be added to the bill, and thus, divided evenly between ten of you.  If everyone else is going to pay 40p for your dessert then there is equally good incentive for them to have a dessert as well.  Naturally the more people that choose the dessert the higher the average cost.  If everyone joins you in having a dessert then each pays full price for their own dessert, because the sum of dessert expenditures rises to £40 (£4 x 10 people). 

Suppose that you valued the dessert at £2 worth of enjoyment – if you were only paying your own costs you would not have a £4 dessert, because its cost is double your benefit.  If you valued the dessert at £6 worth of enjoyment, you would have a £4 dessert, because its cost is only two thirds of your benefit.  When you’re the only one having a dessert (for 40p) your enjoyment exceeds the cost; when six of you have a dessert, your enjoyment no longer exceeds the cost (because you’re now each paying £2.40 for the share of desserts consumed).  

But now assume something different; you didn’t really want a dessert, but you thought that anything from 40p to £2.40 for a dessert would be too good a deal to resist, so you decided to have one.  Generally, artificially low prices encourage people to spend needlessly and consume wastefully – so artificially low dessert prices will encourage diners to consume wastefully.  This analysis is called a ‘marginal cost’ analysis, and it follows another reliable rule of thumb, which is that if a price is set below a marginal cost, people will over consume (or, in the case of services, over use); and if a price is set above a marginal cost people will under-consume (or, in the case of services, under-use).

Suppose now that instead of all the above restaurant situations, the billionaire Arab walks in to the premises and offers every diner a choice.  He gives each diner £25, which they can spend in the restaurant, but any leftover money they get to keep. This means that if Jill prefers to eat and drink moderately, and take home some of the leftover cash, she can; and if Rachel prefers to eat and drink excessively, and spend the full £25 in the restaurant, she also can.  

This is the kind of mandate that I imagine future governments will think is needed for reforming the public sector  

Finally, I’ll leave you with a tip for forecasting what the future will be like; it is based on what I like to call the ‘prescient wisdom of future ages’.

Prescient Wisdom of Future Ages

Whenever you think about reform or improvement to a system, here's a good way to approach it.  Try to consider how people in the future would do things, and try to emulate that now.  That is to say, in most cases people in the future will have developed the wisdom to rectify the mistakes and inefficiencies of those that preceded them.  That is a very succinct summary of our history of progression.  If you lived in pre-democratic times and you were the first to propound the idea that people might like to choose those who represent them, you'd have made a good contribution to humanity.  If you lived in a time when slavery was the norm, or when no one had considered things like foreign aid, or welfare, or the plight of racial discrimination, or equal opportunities for women, and you propounded wisdom to correct these aberrations, you'd have done your bit to help lift humanity onto its next level of progression.