Are Top Sports Stars Actually Overpaid Or Not?

This is one of the longer Blog posts I've written (at just under 3500 words) - but if you are the sort of person who a) reads my stuff regularly, or b) is interested in this particular subject, then you hopefully won't mind its lengthier nature.

I've just read that Sky and BT Sport have paid a record £ 5.1 billion for live Premier League TV rights, which amounts to a 70% increase on the current £3 billion deal. It's a good time, then, to ask the question: Are top sports stars like the highest earning footballers overpaid? I think they are, but not for the reason you might imagine. In actual fact, the standard reason given for why the top footballers are said to be overpaid is, I think, misjudged. The usual argument is that it is obscene to reward footballers with the same money in a week that a heart surgeon gets in a year, or a soldier defending his or her country gets in several years. The odds are some of you reading this now probably hold that view. Here's why that view needs redressing. What people earn is not an issue of moral probity, it is an outcome of market forces related to supply and demand. If a footballer or actor can generate millions of pounds per year more than a nurse or a soldier we are not seeing immorality, we are seeing what people are prepared to pay for a certain skill or service they value. Of course you'll respond by saying that we 'ought' to value a nurse or soldier more than a footballer, musician or actor, but market processes give clear demonstration that we do not.

Quite a few people can be nurses, but only one person can be Jim Carrey or Meryl Streep. And preferences are made up of a collection of the individuals in society, so there is no logical argument that says it's unethical if more people value multi-millionaire Meryl Streep than an individual nurse on £25,000 per year. There is no way to judge the 'fair' pay of a film star, a nurse, a bookmaker, a chemist, a taxi driver or a bouncer except by the demand for what they do and how much those skills and services can generate through market processes. It's not my fault that a soldier gets paid less than a top footballer, and nor is it yours, but it is ours, where 'ours' means everyone in society.

In a supermarket customers pay for the goods the supermarket produces because they value those products. The market rewards of Tesco and Sainsbury's depend, very directly, on the value that their products deliver to society as a whole. Similarly, football wages reflect the scarcity and skill of the players.

Hang on, I hear you object - this is true, but doesn't it miss one key point? The English Premier Football League contains many clubs that are paying players beyond their means, resulting in huge losses which are maintained by benevolent owners who subsidise the shortfalls with earnings from other investments. Doesn't this suggest not that they confer value to justify their earnings, but rather that some people (like Roman Abramovich) have so much money that they've lost touch with the marginal revenue productivity of wages?

I understand the objection, but it isn't a valid one - after all, unless you or I have never paid a little over the odds for something we really wanted, who are we to speak? If an owner wants to pay millions to see his or her team win silverware, that simply reflects their desire to spend their money as they wish.  It is no different from you or I paying over the odds for something we desperately want. Of course, I'd much rather Roman Abramovich gave millions to Water Aid instead of using it to buy egotistical prima donna footballers, but unless we want to live in a world in which people aren't free to spend their money as they wish, we have little to say in the matter.

Given the foregoing, how, then can I maintain that sports stars are, in fact overpaid, as the title of this blog suggests? I'll explain, but to do so it'd be good to start with a basic assessment of value. For many people this is thought to be an entirely subjective issue, contingent on the personal value you place on sport and its performers. But economics usually has a way of answering these questions – and this one is pretty standard textbook stuff.

Assessing value

How do you know if you are of value to your employer? Easy – your value can be measured by what’s called the marginal revenue productivity of wages, which is basically the benefits your employer earns from employing you. If your wages are more than your marginal revenue productivity then you earn more than the sum total of value you bring to your company. The question is, do footballers, tennis players and the like earn more than the sum total of value they bring to their sport or the person paying their wages?

If you tried to answer that question purely on grounds of marginal revenue productivity then it gets tricky, because some sports stars do have such a star status that they have a positive effect on their employer’s revenue. Research done by economists Jerry Hausman and Gregory Leonard showed that star players such as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird “raised television ratings by around 30%, in addition to their effect on paid attendance.”

Knowing a bit about English football, I know that some of the big-spending teams (like Chelsea and Manchester City) regularly make losses by spending over the odds on big name players. In most businesses such high sums would not be paid out when the result constitutes such a deficit on the marginal revenue productivity. But with clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City their owners are not too bothered – they see their clubs as hobbies, and they are willing to make financial losses to attain wins on the field.

In the case of the biggest sports stars, wages are often higher than the marginal revenue productivity of labour – but equally the supply of those extraordinarily talented players is very small, which leads to the spectacularly high wages they receive each week (to give an example: Gareth Bale – one of the world’s best footballers earns in one week what Prime Minister David Cameron earns in two years).

Or take Lionel Messi - perhaps the greatest player the game has ever seen. Messi has been blessed with an immense footballing talent, which is a combination of background, natural ability and hard work. The market system that sees Messi being paid millions of Euros per year to play for Barcelona FC and a Sainsbury's shelf stacker or the CEO of Sainsbury's being paid nothing to play for Barcelona FC is a market that's delivering a better outcome than if Messi was shelf-stacking and Joe the shelf-stacker was a striker for Barcelona FC, even if Messi is earning more than we'd like, and the shelf-stacker less.

But our desires aside, this is the epitome of a supply and demand market - its analogue occurs in price theory, which says that if a product is highly sought by hitting a target then its price will go up when it is in short supply. In football Lionel Messis are in short supply, and in supermarket retail CEOs are in shorter supply than shelf-stackers, with shelf stackers being in more regular supply than top footballers and chief executives. Despite much dissonance, no one should want it any other way, because if there was a mechanism that prevented popular products making inventors rich, and rare skills making CEOs and top footballers sought after, then not only would that be terribly bad for acquiring skills, it would be terribly bad for consumers too, because without consumer prices, suppliers cannot know how much value people place on things.

Adam Smith explained it famously by drawing our attention to a paradox:

"The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarcely anything; scarcely anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it."

If I offered you a choice between a diamond ring and a glass of water you'd choose the diamond ring. The reason why is obvious; you can easily get a glass of water from the tap any time you like, but you'd have to work hard and save up to buy a diamond ring. But paradoxically if I said you have to give up one thing for the rest of your life - diamonds or water, you'd give up diamonds, because while you could live without diamonds, without water you'd die. That's a little like how it is with Lionel Messi (a diamond) and a shelf stacker (water). If you had to have one less shelf-stacker or one less Lionel Messi you'd choose to have one less shelf stacker, because Lionel Messis are much rarer and much more uniquely talented. But if you had to choose to live in a world with no shelf stackers or no footballers you'd probably prefer to keep shelf stackers, lest the food buying industry runs amok (replace shelf stackers in this equation with policemen or car mechanics and the point holds even more so)

So how is it that top sports stars are overpaid then?

I explained that wages are governed by supply and demand, but I hinted earlier that some people (sports stars etc) may actually be overpaid in a market that is pre-dominated by benefactors with big money (like Abramovich, etc). The key question is, how do we measure quantity to find what is excessive and what isn't?  The way we do it is by assigning value using an economic template.

In sport relatively small numbers of participants earn disproportionately vast sums of money compared to the majority of other participants with less talent. But are the differences in talent significant enough to justify the translation into such large differences in wages? I seriously doubt it, which is the best argument for their being overpaid. For example, in football the best premier league players can earn ten times more than the best players from the championship league below, but I doubt they are ten times better in ability. The difference in earnings between a top footballer and a second-tier footballer is not based just on marginal productivity but instead on the financial power of benefactors pumping money into the clubs and the economic power of the media. This applies in all sorts of areas too. People only allocate a limited amount of time to movie watching and cookery books, which means a Brad Pitt film and a Nigella Lawson cookbook each has a higher probability of big sales despite probably only being marginally better than competing films and books.

It's tempting to ask; if sport gives people great pleasure, and people wilfully follow it at some personal cost, who is anyone to say the money could be better spent elsewhere? But that is the wrong question.  The right question would be - if the vast sums of money associated with sport were diminished and put into more worthwhile uses, would the diminution that greatly compromises the quality of sport be worth it against the gains obtained from the increased resources in other uses?  Let's say the benefactors and businessmen behind sport and its media outlets got together and agreed to charitably take 50% of the crazy money out of sport and invest it in projects that helped the needy (Oxfam, Water-Aid, Save The Children, etc). You'd find that the quality of sport would decrease, but not by as much as you'd fear, and not by enough to drastically reduce your pleasure, because the enjoyment levels would soon equilibrate again. Whereas, on the other hand, thanks to the money given to the charities, the quality of life for those in need would increase greatly. 

That is the essential point - sport involves huge sums of money that generates rewards that would not be greatly diminished with much of the crazy money taken out. Good charities that invest their money well ensure that the recipients of that money greatly benefit from as much money as they can get. In the global sense, where we are measuring quality of life and well-being, sport (and many other things, of course) sucks up a lot of money and provides relatively little in return.

Once again, that is not a wild speculation - it is based on the economic principle that market economies quite naturally shape rewards, contribution and demands commensurably.  With a small degree of flexibility, the price of a bunch of bananas, or a mobile phone, or a lawnmower, or a scarf, or the fees of bricklayers, plumbers and removal men reflects the demand and willingness to pay a particular sum for those goods or services.  That is why (save for anomalies) the market generally isn't over-saturated or in great scarcity of the products consumers buy and the services people need. Sport doesn't have this Smithian 'invisible hand' to regulate its dispensations - it can extend globally and amount to a huge over investment which robs us of a great many resources and denies the more valuable and worthwhile alternative uses.  Because of this, irregularity in the market economy doesn't provide the optimum number of sports stars as it does goods, supplies, bricklayers, plumbers and removal men. 

I first came to this realisation while I was watching a Wimbledon tennis match a few years ago: the realisation that we could shave off the top 10% of quality tennis players and not significantly diminish the overall quality of tennis, retaining pretty much the same enjoyment or appreciation as before. That is to say, if the top 10% of tennis players suddenly disappeared, then once we'd adapted I think we’d still have more or less the same enjoyment of tennis with the remaining 90% (I would actually say the same for all sports - which is probably why I'm not very interested in sport generally). A friend of mine had the following objection:

"Ah but how would the world benefit by getting Andy Murray to do something else like play the harp? There's no evidence he would be any good and the net result would just be lower standard of tennis being played and no improvement in world harp playing standards."

That's true if he ends up doing something that he's no good at (like playing the harp). But he won't end up doing something he's no good at, because that won't be sufficient to pay his bills. If tennis suffers no major diminution by Murray's absence, then anything else he does will benefit the society as a whole, so long as what he does earns him a living. The main indication that someone is benefitting society in a vocation is if someone else is willing to pay them for what they're doing. If Murray had no aptitude for the harp then no one will pay him for it. If someone pays him to be a baker or a carpenter or a painter then society is the better for it.

Conversely, I think if the top 10% of contributors to popular music and literature suddenly disappeared I don’t think once we’d adapted we’d still have more or less the same enjoyment of music or literature with the remaining 90%. To paint a picture, and I know this is subjective, but in popular music you'd have to envisage that shaving off the top 10% would leave you with a world in which there were no Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bowie, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, and so on. In literature you'd have to envisage that shaving off the top 10% would leave you with a world absent of Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Greene, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Hardy, and so on.

This is part of a general piece of wisdom that says the world benefits on the whole when great talents go on to employ those talents. I want the future Einsteins to be studying physics at Oxford or Cambridge rather than bumming out and working at Tesco. I want the future Mozarts to be involved in music rather than working in factories or driving in cabs.

A novelist like Dan Brown or JK Rowling has rewards that are easy to demarcate – each book sold is a unit of income. But Roger Federer or Wayne Rooney do not have easily measurable units of income, because their pay cheques are based on relative performance not absolute performance. Tennis tournaments offer huge incentives for effort because under tournament conditions relative performance is primary over absolute achievement. All the winner has to do is play better than his opponents. In absolute terms he may play better the year after he won it and lose because his opponents played even better still. This, of course, is what motivates other players to improve – it is the allure of the big pay cheque, even though the ratio of winners to losers is miniscule. A similar logic applies to the marketplace in general. The salaries of the high earners above us aren’t just high to reflect the skill set of the Chief Exec – for as we know, often the performance of a company is down to factors outside of the Chief Exec’s control. But a higher salary for Chief Execs, managers, supervisors, etc doesn’t just motivate them, it motivates those underneath them. A workplace full of staff wanting to climb the ladder is going to be a stronger workforce than a workplace full of staff with no tangible aspirations, and that probably is one of the hidden benefits of paying your Chief Execs and managers high salaries.    

Another interesting difference between say literature and tennis (as per my examples above) is that if the top 10 % of tennis players weren't playing tennis for a living they'd be doing other things and making perhaps equally good contributions to society overall. Conversely, I think it may be argued that if the top 10% of literary contributors had not written novels but done something else instead their contributions to society overall would not be equally good. This is perhaps heightened by the fact that one only needs to write each book once, and its legacy can endure for any future time.

Do you add any value to tennis by becoming a tennis player?  A tiny bit, but negligible.  If you make bread (and make a living), the world has more bread.  If you become a plumber (and make a living) the world has someone else to fix people's plumbing.  If you become a tennis player or gymnast and win a medal then the world won't have one more winner, it will just have you instead of someone else. 

Follow that pattern.  So, if you reduce tennis players by 10% - the world will have n quality instead of n+1, but that's very slight, particularly when you are none the wiser about those 10% once they've gone.  So virtually no change in tennis. But as far as the world goes, those 10% are now free to do something else.  If they all become plumbers or builders or taxi drivers the world has more of these services, so it's a social gain.  In sport, top performers merely capture lots of income that would have gone elsewhere in the sport, so 10% reduction is not a social cost it's a transfer of wealth. Incidentally, a lawyer largely transfers wealth too - the defendant's gain is the plaintiff's loss (and vice-versa).  They do act as deterrents to unproductive behaviour, but also to productive behaviour and activity too.

Put it this way, if all other tennis players had spent their 15 years playing professional tennis, and Andy Murray had spent those 15 years baking bread, the world of tennis would be just about as good, and the world have 15 years' worth of additional bread. Of course a baker can replace another baker, but the key difference is that another baker can go and do something else, whereas a losing tennis player still spends 15 years playing tennis and losing in tournaments. If one tennis player is a baker instead of competing, the tennis tournaments are almost as exciting, and we would have 15 years' worth of baked goods. It' a valid question to ask how we know the value of the baker's output exceeds the value of say 100 million people's enjoyment of Andy Murray - but what they'd be missing is that those 100 million people would still be enjoying some other tennis player just as much.

The standards to enter the market are different too. A baker who performs 85% as well as the average baker can expect to receive about 85% of the average baker's income, whereas a tennis player who plays 85% as well as the average tennis player probably wouldn't even make it to professional status.

The market has produced good outcomes when it delivers rewards that match the social contribution of the participants. Most sport fails this standard*. The point is, when other inventions fail that standard they are weeded out because demand for them is too scarce to justify their existence. This doesn't happen in sport like it would, say, if Cadbury brought a new combination of flavours in a chocolate bar (called Bananpeach) that almost no one liked. The value of an activity socially is the aggregate of all benefits to everyone, where benefits amount to how much people are willing to pay. If no one is willing to buy the Bananpeach, it will not be manufactured for long. On the other hand, in sport people's willingness to pay is retained due to them not realising that the top earners don't add all that much to how much they'd enjoy the sport if they were absent. In other words, in the chocolate market, the superiority of the Twix, Kit-Kat, Dairy Milk and Mars Bar over Bananpeach makes the Bananpeach unable to compete any more, whereas the superiority of the semi-finalists at Wimbledon no longer makes the first round losers unable to compete anymore.

Does all this mean people should give up their love of sport?  Not necessarily - it gives them pleasure, and the crazy sums of money involved aren't going to change for the better anyway.  Compounding this is the fact that money isn't the same as wealth - money buys you the things you want and need, but it is the assets that money buys that gives quality of life.  You don't create wealth just by giving someone millions of pounds. You create wealth when you start a company that fulfils the demands of the consumer with the supply of a particular product that adds quality or well-being to people's lives. You create wealth when you streamline a company of its extraneous staff. You create wealth every time you close down an entity that sucks up more resources than it provides. You create wealth when you invent new things, or synthesise multiple concepts in innovation, or construct new theories that generate prosperity when actioned. That is why the crazy money in sport is doing much less good than that crazy money could do elsewhere.

*Obviously I'm only talking about professional sport. People who partake in sport in their leisure time are doing so for their own pleasure, so it's unlikely it will provide rewards below their contribution. 

On Democracy

On January 20th people in the UK celebrated the 750th anniversary of the first parliament, calling it Democracy Day. Democracy is far from perfect, but it does at least give people a voice and makes our representatives accountable at the ballot box. There is a fundamental reason, though, why democracy is strictly limited - it is because, unlike Aumann's Agreement Theorem*, a democratic system isn't about closing the gap on the issues about which we disagree, it is about a proportion of conflicting ideologies winning popularity over others.

While a rigorous intellectual enquiry reconciles discordances, democracy merely inflates them with a system of winners and losers. To rub salt in the wounds, politicians know that a huge number of the electorate are pretty ignorant about politics and economics, so they look not to what's good for the country but what is likely to be popular in terms of votes

Because of how our top earners raise the average wage, the majority of people in the UK earn below the average wage, which means they are going to be swayed by redistributionist policies targeted at the rich, and economic policies that hamper progress. Unfortunately, in terms of viable representatives, this means the public do not get what they need; they get what they think they want. Or to use a culinary analogy, instead of getting to choose between a fillet steak, a sirloin steak and a rump steak, the public instead gets to choose between several rump steaks with slightly different flavoured sauces.

Despite the increased human assent to democratic values, there is one key thing that will always provide a resistance; and it is that for all her picturesque backdrops and glorious natural scenery, nature is not very democratic at all. When it comes to health, looks, size, shape, talents, intelligence, sensory apparatus, opportunity and background, nature is far from democratic - there is a notable difference in all of these human qualities in each of us, as their attainment depends on undemocratic things like fortune and pursuit.

Further, there is no democracy in the qualities we try to attain either. Successful romantic love is not democratic: it reveals itself more to the faithful pursuer of monogamy than it does the uncommitted philanderer. Goodness is not democratic: it emerges more in those who seek moral probity than those who pursue selfishly bad ends. Knowledge is not democratic: it is the natural reward of diligence and effort, and absent in lazy-minded slackers. Good health is not democratic: it is contingent on the lifestyle chosen, genetic legacies, and other physiological factors too. And more generally, the achievements, the wisdom, and the fulfilments we secure are not democratic: they are the reward of hard work and an earnest pursuit of things that are good for us.

Our democratic leanings, then, are assented to in spite of nature not because of it. Those leanings are based on a popular view about equality - the view that it is fundamental to a successful society and peaceable co-existence. Our yearning for equality is in one sense a good thing - it is the recognition that we want everyone to make the best of their raw material, irrespective of genes, looks, intelligence and background. But in another sense, and sadly the predominant sense, it is pernicious in its fear of success and advancement. At its worst its proponents hate the thought of wealth stratification, superiority and divergence in achievement - they behave like starved organisms desperate to lament the oxygen of others, leading only to envy and resentment.

While the first tenet of equality is noble, the second is ignoble, and we must have no truck with it. Just as an education system that gave everyone the same grades would be unrepresentative, and a 400 metre race in which everyone crossed the line together would be pointless, similarly, a society devoid of wealth stratification, superiority and divergence in achievement would be a society in which those richest of human qualities - freedom to pursue talents, rewards for hard work, benefits to innovation, and positives that emerge from moral and intellectual excellence - were rendered meaningless.

I tend to agree with Churchill that democracy is the least bad of all alternatives rather than being stunningly good in itself. Still, we have it, and we're better off than most countries, so we mustn't grumble too much - as long as we keep one step ahead of democracy's limitations.  

* See here for my blog post on Aumann's Agreement Theorem

The Greens Are Growing In Popularity - But Be Careful What You Wish For

I was reading the other day that The Green Party Is The Second Most Popular Party For Young People (with Labour being the most popular).

So despite losing the intellectual battle years ago, it seems that the economic left does have a political future then?

Alas, yes, it seems that way, but it's easy to see why the myths perpetuated by the economic left continue - we are all socialists really.

What? What do you mean we're all socialists? David Cameron is not a socialist; neither is Jacob Rees-Mogg, nor Owen Paterson, and neither are you, Philosophical Muser. It's just not true.

But you mean something different. Here's what I mean. There's a very important distinction - one I made here - the one between the socialist in the socio-personal economy and the socialist in the market economy. In their attraction to the economic left, many young people are confusing the two by a false conflation. When it comes to the evolutionary socialist in us - the one that assents to kinship, inter-personal bonds and shared-interest groups, the predominant force is the socio-personal economy, explaining our natural assent towards sharing, being generous and kind, and mutually assisting one another. This legacy has primed us for millennia, long before any such thing as a market economy of trade came into place. Consequently, on grounds of adhering to our socio-personal make-up, we are justifiably faithful to a socialistic framework in our cognition.

That is not the same, though, as saying that because of our socio-personal socialism we can justify socialism on market economy grounds. As the history of hard left economics taking root in China and Russia shows, and as is still being shown today in France under Hollande, the market economy operates under a different heuristic to the socio-personal.

Our affinity with friends and family is based on bonds of attachment, either blood-connection (relatives) or like-mindedness (beloveds, friends, and social groups). But the market economy extends way beyond these affinity rings, where success isn't just about familial bonds or connecting with like-minded people, it is about connecting with the vast majority of people who are not like us. I may have little in common with the Indian chef who cooks my chicken biryani, or the garage mechanic who fixes my car, or the vet who cares for my cat, but what connects us is our ability to specialise in a market economy where goods and services create value, and where diversity augments that value through multiplicity.

The qualities of the affinity rings related to the socio-personal are not the sort of qualities that can be artificially engendered from on high in a top-down organisational hegemony, which is why socialism in the market economy is futile as well as being empirically imprudent. What's happening with the rise in popularity from the economic left is that they are trying to rivet on to their (our) socio-personal socialism a justifiable market socialism, which is a bit like trying to justify sleeping with all our colleagues at work on the grounds that we sleep with our husband or wife at night in our own homes. Different strokes for different folks.

Hmm, so if we can see where these socialist tendencies come from, this green popularity surge is probably not that surprising either, is it?

It's not that surprising. In the forties and fifties most of the general public would have been fairly unmindful and apathetic towards environmental issues. Even when I was a lad in the late seventies/early eighties you hardly heard a word about the environment. Environmental campaigners in those days were generally regarded as over-sensitive and largely eccentric neurotics - an easy imputation when you're part of a minority cult. What's apparent, though, is that the next couple of generations that followed had been taking a great deal of notice of what they were saying, eventuating in this young green-conscious generation that is now reaching positions of influence in government and business, and turning our mainstream parties greener too.

So politicians are under pressure to be greener?

They are if they want to appeal to young voters, yes. I'm told that the RSPB has over one million members, which alone tops the number of members of all the main political parties. Add to that all the Greenpeace members and people of the green-left persuasion and it's probably becoming apparent that environmental concern is a great deal more ubiquitous than is given credit for. We know the civil service runs thousands of private opinion polls and focus groups each year, as well as heeding the pressure from farming syndicates and various interest groups keen to preserve the greenness of the UK, so it's unsurprising that politicians are feeling the pressure to respond to the nation's greenness. Politicians are, after all, primarily interested in votes and popularity, so they have to generate policies that won't be seen as costly in terms of votes.

Even though we see increased environmental awareness in younger people these days, it’s often the case that a vote for a minor party means a vote that expresses disenchantment towards the mainstream parties.

True as that is, I think over the next few decades we might see a change in the political landscape, where instead of having two predominant parties, we have five or six mid-size parties, which will mean policies that used to be trivial will soon be more in the mainstream.

Gulp!

Exactly! It's well known that when you're a minor party your policies don't have to withstand quite so much rigorous intellectual scrutiny as the major parties. When I talk of policies, I mean, of course, proposals that require the management of funds. Don't forget, the government do not have any funds of their own - they only have public money handed over by the taxpayers. So everything needs paying for, meaning that the policies that come under the most intense scrutiny are the ones that require the most diligent economic analysis. Minor parties scarcely have to do this because there is little chance of them ever having enough power to implement those policies. Consequently, then, minor parties are able to have the charmed political life of promising attractive things without ever facing the danger of having to balance them out in the economy. For a long time the Liberal Democrats had this distinction, until slow increase in popularity eventuated in a coalition with The Conservatives which then mercilessly exposed their economic policies . Like the minor parties of today, the Lib Dems used to proffer policies that told people what they thought they wanted to hear, only to have them candidly exposed when their merits and demerits were under more careful examination.

And the Green Party is even worse than the Lib Dems?

Worse? You bet it's worse; it's worse in the same way two broken legs are worse than a grazed knee. For an indication of this, have a look at Andrew Neil's Sunday Politics interview with Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, which stands out for me as one of the most alarming exposures of ill-conceived economic policy I've seen in a long time. It's rare to see a leader having her party's policies torn to shreds without even the smallest ability to defend them or balance them up - instead simply getting in a jam each time and responding with “I would urge your viewers to go our website and see how the figures are worked out.” 

Alas, that's the reality, though - their policies are indefensible - economic moonshine of the worst kind I've seen. Not only are they inimical to successful human progression and increased prosperity, they are antithetical to even the basic truths you'd learn about in first year economics.

Even if we pretend there is some solid rationale for the so-called ‘Citizens’ Income’, which promises a minimum weekly income of £72, the economic cost (£280 billion) is a pipe dream. The same is true of their proposed wealth tax, which Bennett claims will generate between £32 billion and £45 billion, when the reality is that wealth taxes in other European countries generated only a fraction of that. Add to that the proposals for import tariffs, business subsidies, increased minimum wage, price controls, and the kind of Piketty-esque redistributive taxations that would retard innovation, and probably drive much of our best talent out of the UK, and there is a good case to made that with The Green Party in their current form, we have, in terms of the economy, perhaps the most dangerous fringe party of them all - a party whose policies would severely compromise the global benefits of innovation, trade, competition and the free market of supply and demand far more than all the other parties would.

A vote for the Green Party actually gives every indication of being a vote for negative growth, as they look to free humankind from what they perceive as the disaster of its Promethean economic advances. While it’s true that in some cases people willingly vote for one of the smaller parties because they are disenchanted with mainstream politics, it’s also true that as the landscape begins to shift, and dissection of the minor parties' policies intensifies as more look to get their feet in Westminster’s door, surely very few people could actually bear to envisage what the country would be like if The Green Party's policies were ever made manifest in any kind of sphere of political influence.

With the ever-rising popularity of the Green Party, it is no longer the case that the green vote is a spoiled vote in protestation at the mainstream parties, nor merely a principled vote towards a candidate they actually like and believe cares about the world - it is, in terms of human well-being, a vote for what is surely the party with the most dangerously counter-productive set of policies that has ever got this close to the mainstream.

 * This was also published as an Adam Smith Institute Article (see here)

Stephen Fry: A Response To The Responses - Why Evil & Suffering Are Not Valid Objections To Christianity

There have been one or two responses to Stephen Fry's viral video from prominent atheists (such as from Larry Moran and from PZ Myers), claiming that to give any attention to the theodicy problem is to give Christianity too much intellectual consideration. I wrote a Blog post in response to Stephen Fry's video, which received a widely positive reception, although one commentator was disappointed that I didn't, in his view, actually attempt to respond to the theodicy problem (the problem of evil and suffering).

It's true, I didn't, but for good reason - and the reason is, when it comes to Christianity's truth or falsehood, there is no theodicy problem in the first place, because propositions about theodicy depart from the central claims of Christianity, so cannot be used as a tool against its efficacy. For example, suppose I made the following three claims:

1) Hinduism is false because India is not the richest country in the world.

2) Islam is false because it hasn't rained in Mecca every Tuesday since Mohammed's birth.

3) Astrology is false because the moon isn't made of cheese.

Now there are plenty of good arguments for why Hinduism, Islam and Astrology are false, but the ones I gave above are not good examples, they are extreme and irrelevant. I've picked extreme cases to make the point obvious: they are not good arguments against Hinduism, Islam and Astrology because those claims are not claims made by Hindus, Muslims and Astrologers, so have no bearing on their truth or falsity.

For example, astrology is false because the position of the sun and the constellation configurations at the time of a baby's birth bears no relevant relation to the personality or future endeavours of that baby - it is not false because of the moon's lack of cheesiness, for the simple reason that astrology makes no claims about the moon's cheesiness. Similarly, Hinduism is false because the gods the founders made up don't actually exist; it has nothing to do with India's material prosperity because Hinduism makes no claims about that.

Now notice how those extreme examples are brought to bear on the issue of Christianity. Stephen Fry rejects Christianity on the basis that suffering occurs in the world, but just like the above examples, Christianity doesn't make any claims of a suffering-free world - quite the contrary, we are told that this temporary state of affairs comes with tremendous amounts of evil, pain, injustice and general misery. This is the affliction - the tragedy of being human - from which the cross offers us eventual escape and emancipation, as the book of Revelation tells us.

The only rational basis on which Christianity can be dismissed is by counterclaims to what the faith intrinsically says about itself. It cannot be rationally dismissed with an argument (like the existence of evil and suffering) that Christianity doesn't even claim to be true of itself.  So although Mr Fry may feel like there is too much evil and suffering in the world to justify belief in a perfect Divine Creator, if we are being faithful to solid, rational enquiry, it should be made known that philosophically the issue of evil and suffering is not a sound objection to Christianity - it is, like most objections to Christianity, an objection to a made-up alternative version of Christianity to which most Christians don't actually subscribe.

 

* Photo courtesy of virtueonline.org

Stephen Fry on God: Missing The Wood For The Trees?

A video of Stephen Fry has just gone viral - it's the one in which he gives quite a frank response to the question "What would you say to God?":

"I'd say, bone cancer in children? What's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God that creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?"

What this really amounts to is Stephen Fry not being able to reconcile the world with a Creator God. That's fair enough - some people can't, whereas others can. Whichever way we cut the cloth, it is a tough world, with lots of cruelty and injustice as well as plenty of beauty and wonder, and whereas many atheists can't see that world as being created by a perfect God, Christians see the fallenness and afflictions of nature as being part of the earthly narrative from which God has saved us in Christ, and into which He'll come back again to restore to glory.

It's quite understandable that believers and unbelievers would view the above differently, but here's an interesting question that both may not have considered in quite this way - one that on first inspection seems easy and obvious, but on closer inspection maybe isn't. The question is: given the natural laws of nature, why is it that we can imagine a reality so much better than this one? The 'on the surface' answer is easy, but deeper layers reveal it to be a much more profound question.

The surface answer seems to be that we can imagine a better reality because we know of a better reality through other people's experience. For example, if you asked me the question - how can you imagine how good it would be to win the lottery and be super rich? - my answer would be that although I've never been super rich myself, I know what the pleasures of having money is like, I know what nice things are like, and I can get a sense of what others are feeling when they win big money. They have more days off than me; they have more holidays, a nicer house, a nicer car, they can do more to help others financially, and so forth.

The reason I can imagine how good it would be to win the lottery and be super rich is because the pleasures are not qualitatively beyond what I can conjecture - they amount to a quantitative increase in pleasure because they are more of what I already know. Similarly, suppose a machine was invented that can make the male orgasm last 30 minutes. I can imagine what a 30 minute orgasm would be like because I know what a shorter orgasm feels like, so again what I'm being asked to consider is a quantitative improvement not a qualitative one.

Now when it comes to the question - why is it that we can imagine an other-worldly reality so much better than this one? - we obviously need a qualifier, because it is easy to assume that the so-called 'better' reality imagined is really a mental aggregation of all our earthly experiences and aspirations.

But it seems to me that there is more to it than that. The imagined better world I have in mind seems to me to be the imagination of a reality that transcends our universe altogether. Perhaps it is intuition, perhaps it is even a trick of the mind - but perhaps that reality imagined really is a case of tapping into an extra-worldly reality for which we were created - that this world is only a prelude to a more stupendous disquisition not yet fully realised.

Here's another additional point to ponder. It's also the case that in evolutionary terms the things most necessary for survival are the things most inherent in our cognitive make-up: the need for food, drink, copulation, warmth, safety, and so forth. But it is interesting that the things most necessary for our survival are not the most wonderful things that make life really worth living in terms of those stupendous pleasures that make life so glorious. That is to say, the things about reality that make it really worth living in terms of supererogation (more than what is asked for) are those extras in life not necessary for survival but that make life all the more enriching - the joy of romantic love, the marvelling at great poetry, and art, and theology, and literature, and mathematical patterns, the enchantment of deep philosophical questions, and the beauty of imbibing the wonder of the natural world - they are the things least necessary for survival, but yet the most intellectually stunning and emotionally breathtaking things about being human.

Maybe when the poets tell us that heavenly roses are planted where earthly thorns grow, and that we are to expect souls to heaven taking flight, they were tapping into hints of a reality that dwarfs the stupendousness of earthly life. Perhaps when Christian scripture writers tell us that we have a heavenly city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God, or that the river of the water of life is as bright as crystal and flowing from the throne of God, or that there will be a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, what's actually being expressed with those metaphors and symbolisms is the real glory for which we were created, and into which we'll enter, thanks to Christ's love and grace on the cross.

*Photo courtesy of M2.Joe.ie

On Writing, Adam Smith & The Institute

I've just starting writing for, and am probably going to become a regular contributor to, the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) - an excellent think tank and vehicle of market research which, according to Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings published this week, is rated the 16th best think tank in Western Europe, the 5th best out of all the International Economic Policy think tanks, and 3rd best in the UK.

So I'm in good company, amongst regular social commentators who you'll often see on TV, putting people straight on Newsnight, The Daily Politics, Sky News and so forth. But even though the general ethos of the ASI creates a libertarian milieu in which I'd usually feel fully ingratiated, there is always that big caveat with me - I am, at heart, a solitary worker, unbound by political parties, ideologies, inner rings, and group identity.

As I've said before, in domestic pet terms, I'm far more feline than canine, preferring my projects to remain within the body of my overall life's work, rather than being engulfed into the practices of an organisation or institution. In short, I'm bound not to consent to or fully concord with every tenet of an organisation's views, so any work I do for anyone is always going to be secondary to what I'm trying to accomplish in my own life's work.

What I will try to bring to the ASI is a balance that looks at present to be missing in some parts, where free market qualities are sometimes exaggerated to the extent that too much emphasis is placed on the market economy and too little consideration is given to what I call socio-personal factors.

Or to put it another way, which Adam Smith fans will recognise straight away, the ASI is probably about an 85% "Wealth of Nations" kind of group, and a 15% "Theory of Moral Sentiments" kind of group, when, in my view, a 50% of each mentality would be best. Those are Adam Smith's two great works - both thoroughly excellent, but while the majority of people associate Smith with the "Wealth of Nations" approach to humankind, where market develops by virtue of our self-serving instincts, his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is much more concerned with our propensity to be kind, generous and altruistic (see altruism footnote*) towards each other.

Putting to bed the market myth

Before I get to the main point, let me just put to bed a myth about the market economy. The free market isn't an overarching sentience that confers conscience, ethicality and will over the proceedings - it is a descriptive term that describes the mutually voluntary allocations of value (be it money, goods, services or labour) between everyone in society. That does not, however, mean that the system is unconscionable or incorrigible, as some claim. If the free market is the mutually voluntary allocations of value between everyone in society (with mutually voluntary being the operative words) then there is nothing immoral going on in libertarian economics. 

By definition the problems we see in the world cannot be caused by the mutually voluntary allocations of value between everyone in society - they can only be caused by an impediment to those freedoms - usually in the shape of bad government policies, poor regulatory protocols, or an oppressive State regime. In other words, and this is a point that even Adam Smith couldn't have foresaw to the extent that we do, it's a lack of free market qualities that besieges them, not the opposite.

It's true that most people in the free market don't have the breadth and depth to consider the complex strategic high level perspective associated with the wider market, but as Adam Smith showed in his Wealth of Nations, in market economics competition brings about self-interest for the good of everyone, where value is created because prices near-perfectly match supply and demand.

The market economy and the socio-personal economy

Now for the balance. The market system (no system, in fact) is a panacea to cure our human ills - but this is where Smith's other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, comes in, because although Smith didn't have a forward notion of the kind of interconnected nexus of social activity we see in the modern age, he did understand that the selfish habits that drive the market economy (and create virtue and accountability actually) have to be balanced by kindness and consternation for one another.

So, what I will try to contribute to the ASI is more awareness that there is a good balance to be struck between a market economy and a socio-personal economy. We could easily speak at length about the differences between the market economy and the socio-personal economy, but the principal distinction is that the market economy has exchanges that are precisely recorded in terms of cash exchanged or increases/decreases in 1s and 0s on banks' computers, and the socio-personal economy has exchanges that are less-precisely recorded in terms of voluntary transactions for the good of one another.

The difference between their operations is notable too. In the financial economy the demand almost always exceeds the supply (of a limited range of labour, goods and services), because suppliers maintain their status differential (principally income) by increasing their prices or their supplies (or a combination of both), and endeavour to become top of the supplier tree by out-competing their competitors.  

Conversely, in the case of a socio-personal economy, the supply (of a nigh-on unbounded range of actions) almost always exceeds the demand, and suppliers who care enough about others maintain their status differential (primarily their character and reputation) by trying to summon up new ways to be a better person. Of course, a financial economy has a necessary social economy woven into it, because it’s hard to be successful in business without good character and reputation.

If one is going to have any assent towards the brilliance and prescience of Adam Smith, at the forefront of economic thinking should always be the mindfulness that society doesn't just function through Smithian economic transactions, it functions through social mindfulness too, which involves doing our bit at a cost to ourselves to help society.

Where it goes wrong is in many people's failure to target the right enemy. Poverty, unfairness, exploitation and injustice are certainly human ills - but the natural response from the economic left is to blame capitalism, when capitalism is the wrong target for their opprobrium. The balance that needs to be struck is an economic one that frees up the global market so everyone can partake in those mutually voluntary allocations of value, and a moral one that can better feed into the areas the market cannot, or has not, yet reached.

Too many libertarians think too highly in terms of market economics, and as a consequence they pay too little regard to socio-personal qualities that are woven into economic behaviour. And too many on the economic left think too highly in terms of socio-personal qualities by using them as tools for condemning market economics, and as a consequence they pay too little regard to, or harbour unawareness of, just what those mutually voluntary allocations of value (money, goods, services or labour) between everyone in society over the past 200 years have done for human prosperity and well-being (alongside science). Unless that proper balance is struck, any analyses brought to the table will be woefully inadequate and detrimentally one-sided.

 

* Footnote: Quick point on altruism; If you'll recall, altruism means individual behaviour that increases the fitness of an organism while decreasing the actor's fitness. In Robert Trivers' "Social Evolution", for an act to be called altruistic it must be demonstrated that the actor is incurring a cost. We've said that although there are occasions when we do something with seemingly no ulterior motive or assent towards outward self-interest, there is always the concomitant pleasure and satisfaction that such acts confer on the self. If it is the case that the benefits to the self always exceed the cost of the beneficent act (and that's by no means a certainty), this means it is nigh on impossible for a human to be altruistic.

** I have three pieces so far for the ASI - you can view them through the following hyperlinks if you wish:

Why emissions tests are so exhausting

Restating the case for freedom of speech

A plain pack of lies

Profit Needn't Be A Dirty Word, And When It Comes To Your Money It Usually Isn't

It's quite a common view that when profit enters the public sector through market forces there are reasonable grounds for complaint, as wonderful State-run organisations give way to cold, hard, money-oriented capitalism, and efficient service provision gives way to profit motives. But as anyone with even the sketchiest understanding of economics and moderate familiarity with post-WWII British history would know, this is misjudged. Admittedly this misjudgement is ubiquitous, but its ubiquity should not blind people to its foolishness.

All services need two things to function - they need capital to pay for the material goods, and they need labour in the shape of a paid workforce. The money for this can come from two places - it can either come from private investors, whose own money is at stake and whose interest is in overseeing a successful operation, or it can come from the government, whose money comes from taxpayers, and whose interest is always primarily in courting popularity and votes.

Already, it is obvious which of the two investors is most likely to have the efficacy of the organisation as top priority, and most likely to have carefully considered research to back this up. Profit, far from being a dirty word comparable to smelly bodily secretion in a room full of fresh food, is actually the primary signal as to whether an organisation is being run well.

Yes, of course the State-run health services, education, schools, roads, etc do not have to have profit as their overriding goal in order to provide a public service to the electorate. But for reasons that often slip by unnoticed, profit is the key ally in the measure of the service, because it acts as a barometer to measure overall efficiency. Efficiency is to an organisation as justice is to a court of law, it is the principal measure of whether the organisation is fit for purpose - and anyone who thinks that that varies according to whether the organisation is publicly or privately funded is thinking absurdly. 

Being in the public sector, as I am with my role in local government, I have to work as efficiently as possible in order to save the taxpayer money. But whereas a private company is underpinned by its goal of profit and good service, a State-funded organisation (like mine) is underpinned by its goal of savings and good service. What's being missed by people who dislike profit is that profits and savings are really two wings of the same golden eagle - they are exhibitions of efficiency and of prudent use of finances. Any profit that public sector organisations make is efficiency that benefits taxpayers.

Some people are under the impression that the service suffers when profit is the motive, but that's to overlook two things: firstly, delivering profit is delivering efficiency, which is part of the service we should desire; and secondly, if you eradicate profit motives from your organisation you lose sight of many of the signals for an efficient service. This is easy to see in the free market - businesses that see a diminution of quality in product or service will lose custom to better competition - and this is the biggest incentive for them to guard against complacency. Without similar signals in the public sector, the same thing happens, except where there is no competition to pick up lost custom, we see only profligacy, stagnation and lingering inefficiency.

In the free market, success is measured on whether the goods or services you provide are valued by the public more than the price they'd be charged to acquire them. Conversely, if goods or services are funded by taxpayers, there is much less pressure to provide something efficient and of value because those signals are lost in the continual flow of public money poured in. For that reason, efficiency of service and of resources is astronomically more likely to occur in the private sector, not the public sector.

On Addiction: The Philosophical Muser vs. Peter Hitchens

I sometimes have the odd email exchange with Peter Hitchens, and did so again a couple of days ago, this time about the so-called war on drugs. I've blogged about his drug views before (see here), but in our exchange I ended up challenging his peculiar views about addiction by sending him this blog post of mine, on which he wrote the following in the comments section:

(PH) You're going to have to decide whether you accept the concept of 'addiction' or not. You can't simultaneously refer to 'addicts' and say that addiction is a 'life choice'. The key to this is realising that the advocates of this fiction use it to mean different things at different times, an unsustainable inconsistency which would not survive ten minutes, if 'addiction' weren't so valuable to moral revolutionaries who wish to destroy the idea that we have free will.

So in his wisdom Peter Hitchens wants to deny that addiction exists at all, calling it a fiction that can’t survive a moment’s serious analysis. Here's what I responded with:

(JK) I actually can refer to 'addicts' and in the same blog say that addiction is a 'life choice' - the two aren't mutually exclusive, but you must phrase it aright, because I didn't say that addiction is a life choice, I said that humans can make life choices that lead to addiction. It's a big difference.

Most don't choose the addiction, they choose activities that can lead to addiction. That's why I used the sun-tan analogy in the article. Going to the tanning shop is a life choice. The mutations that increase your chances of skin cancer are not a life choice, but they are the results of a life choice to visit the tanning shop. If you want to avoid this risk of skin cancer, don't go to tanning shops or partake in excessive sunbathing.

Similarly, taking drugs like heroin is a free choice. However, the physiological dependencies that occur as a result of this are not a life choice - they are the body's involuntary reaction to the need for more of heroin's constituencies. If you want to avoid the risk of being a heroin addict, don't take heroin. If you choose to take heroin you may become an addict - meaning that you are an 'addict' who made life choices that led to your addiction state, so no inconsistency.

In addition to that, it's often in a very weighted sense that we talk about a life choice to indulge in substances that lead to addiction. That is to say, there is some indication that most drug addicts are addicts for socio-economic and bad personal background reasons weighted against them, more than they are for reasons intrinsically about the drugs. For that reason alone, it's not just the fact that Peter Hitchens is wrong empirically that is his problem (and he is wrong empirically - for example, there is quite good evidence that addictive behaviour is a lot do to with genetic predisposition - as studies exhibit higher rates of addiction among monozygotic [identical] twins rather than dizygotic [fraternal] twins, which clearly suggests genetic factors) - it's that he lacks so much sympathy for people who've ended up on different paths to him - that's got to be the main reason so many people respond in such a negative way to him.

My theory about addiction

I have a theory about addiction; it's that addictive behaviour falls along a similar line to a law know as the principle of least effort, which is that things in nature will, in terms of effort, naturally choose the path of least resistance. Not only are we all potential addicts in any number of areas of life, with our background and experiences being key driving forces; on closer inspection almost all of us are at the extreme end of the addictive spectrum at given times, and are probably periodically addicted to things through genetic weakness and temporary diminution of willpower.

Perhaps the reason so many of us are below the radar is that the principle of least effort is, for many, so transitory that it rarely registers in our social circles. But whether it's not being able to stop eating those chocolate biscuits we started, or curb our enthusiasm for the final two or three glasses of Jack Daniels when we're on a pub night out, or even finding it difficult to resist putting a new song we really love on repeat, our propensity for addiction is there (albeit often unconsciously) in small doses as well as in those extreme cases that stand out more. 

That would also suggest to me that the age-old chicken and egg question - whether they take drugs because they are addictive, or whether they are addictive because they take drugs - is probably based on antecedents that were laid down long before. As a Christian it would be good if Peter Hitchens exemplified a bit more of Christ's character in his appraisal of other people's weaknesses. Then again, he is not alone - too often we could all the same about ourselves.

 

* Photos courtesy of www.rehab.com and dailymail.co.uk

 

Movie-Watching That Would Shock Your Grandmother

I once pondered whether there will ever be a fully explicit blow job shot in a mainstream movie – not because I cared about that, per se, but because I am interested in how our perceptions change. As time goes by, sexually explicit and graphically violent movie scenes that would have been thought to be unacceptable in the past eventually become permissible as standards change – so just how far are we going to go?

To a 1930s audience, films in the 1970s like The Wild Bunch, Deliverance and Last Tango In Paris would have been shocking. To a 1970s audience, films in the 1990s like Basic Instinct, Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers probably would have been a step too far.  And I doubt a 1990s audience would have been quite ready for recent shockers like Saw, Hostel, The Human Centripede and A Serbian Film.

This leads me to wonder; what will be occurring in future films that will shock our current generation? If we've become more indecent and sexually explicit as we've gone from The Seven Year Itch to Belle De Jour to Last Tango In Paris to The Postman Always Rings Twice to 9 1/2 Weeks to Basic Instinct to Kids to dreadfully horrible films like Hostel and Antichrist - whatever will the future films that shock this current generation be like?  Most people nowadays are so inured to the kind of explicit sex scenes that once shocked us in films like Basic Instinct that we see similar levels of explicitness in pretty much every film that contains sex scenes (some as low as 15 certificate).

What's ironic is that people complaining about the increased sex and violence in films, music videos and computer games nowadays were once the people taking forays into similar risqué things themselves in their youth. In other words, many of the parents complaining today were once kids being complained about by their parents. The parents complaining about Miley Cyrus* today were once youngsters taking bold steps forward about when they were teenagers watching Madonna's semi-erotic music videos and concerts. The parents complaining about Madonna were once youngsters taking bold steps into the decadent world of punk music or glam rock or heavy metal. The parents complaining about punk, glam and heavy metal were once youngsters getting turned on by Elvis's swinging pelvis - and in each of those cases, that which shocked the parents would have been tame in comparison to that which went on to shock their progeny.

Times change – and the standards continue to be loosened and relaxed as we become more liberal about sex, violence and the other ways humans can push the boundaries further back. I'd say one of two things will happen in the future; either we'll reach a point at which the consensus deems us to have pushed the boundaries back as far as we reasonably dare; or else we'll continue to become more explicitly immodest and daringly salacious until blow jobs are pretty commonplace in mainstream movies.

And if you can't imagine us going that far, well just remember that the people watching The Seven Year Itch when it came out would have never imagined that one day we'd be watching films like Basic Instinct. As is often the case, the past serves to warn us about the future - but as is also so often the case, we don't learn from it, and we find how freely the chickens (or should that be cocks?) come home to roost.

As Antonio and Sebastian found in Shakespeare's The Tempest when conspiring to kill Alonso the King of Naples - "What's past is prologue". But just as Antonio and Sebastian were thwarted by Ariel - I hope that the boundaries that we have pushed so far back do not become past prologues to a future in music and film that sends us into a state in which modesty, decency, propriety and decorum have been all but lost. It may not be too late to save ourselves if we are alert to the danger of the past becoming the prologue, and remain ready to let past mistakes act as a corrective for future endeavours.

* I'd never even heard of Miley Cyrus until Sunday, when a debate about her raunchy videos and the example they set her young fans occurred on the BBC.

** Photo courtesy of romantiqueandrebel.com 

One Of The Big Ironies Of Blog Writing

 

Avid readers of The Philosophical Muser blog may recall that a while ago I (we?) celebrated 100 blog posts. Well, a few blog posts ago we reached 200 (we're now on 220), so I thought I'd write a brief piece about writing, because the relationship between the writer and the reader is an interesting one, often fraught with tension. I'll explain.

Confirmation bias is a phenomenon that affects many people* - it's the habit of assessing things in ways that already conform to your views. For example, people who believe in God will often see patterns in nature that conform to a Divinely created world. People who don't believe in God will not. Socialists will often see capitalism predominantly as a nasty uncaring system that fosters exploitation and unfair inequality, whereas many pro-market capitalists will fail to see the problems for which capitalism has no solution.

Consequently, once a person holds a firm view on something - be it religion, politics, economics, ethics, or myriad other topics – you’ll find it’s hard to get them to change their mind and see the situation differently, even if what they believe is absurd, nonsensical or contrary to known facts. Given the foregoing, those who write publicly for human consumption will have a readership divided roughly into three groups.

The first group, and by far the smallest, will be those with no heavy predispositions or strong cognitive biases. People in this group may consider your thoughts with quite a balanced and open mind, and may in many cases be persuaded by good reasoning and empirical substantiation.

The other two groups, making the huge majority, will be people who are going to be for you or against you.

The second group will be people that are generally for you. People in this group will share your general ethos, and they will mostly concur with the majority of your conclusions. They will probably begin your article by already being primed to agree, so may often be less discerning when it comes to spotting faults with your reasoning.

The third group will be people that are opposed to your general ethos, and they will mostly disagree with your conclusions. They will probably begin your article by already being primed to oppose, and may often be less discerning when it comes to identifying strengths in your reasoning and the good points you make.

We see this played out all the time with various public figures. For example, affiliates of Ken Ham will read his blog and look for all the ways that a creationist worldview is the correct one. Opponents of Melanie Philips will read her articles and look for all the ways that liberal, socially conservative views are the incorrect ones.

Given the foregoing, it must be said that in all likelihood the writer of articles, columns, essays and blogs quite often doesn’t have much of a positive impact on his or her readers, particularly when the subject matter is politics or religion. It’s probably going to be the case that your most avid readers are people who share your views and like what you have to say, with those who are generally opposed being the most predisposed to disagreement and rejection.

As a consequence, then, with regard to the writers that can edify and enlighten, the people who most need those writers are the ones least likely to regularly read them, and the ones who need them least will be more likely to be regular followers.

Of course, there are many exceptions to that – but it’s a pattern that clearly occurs quite regularly. Just as Shannon's information theory model observed how a message's flow can break down from source to destination, we too observe how, in public discourse, the general language and interactions of protagonists so often breaks down in communication. Take the economic propositions about welfare or the ecological debates about climate change. In either of those debates, both sides are probably not too dissimilar in their aims; they just disagree on how to achieve those aims. What causes much of the irreconcilability is often the cultural and social backdrop that underpins people’s beliefs and views.  Views and beliefs are more tribal than people care to admit.

The economic left tend to see political problems as social problems based on class differentials and as conflicts between oppressors (those successful in business) and the oppressed (the less successful and the unemployed). The economic right tend to see those problems in relation to the extent to which liberty, freedom and open trade are being hamstrung. Whenever there is a debate, you can be pretty confident that one party or the other is wrong, and usually easily shown to be so – therefore, that disagreements are so prevalent is good evidence that they are based on emotional and intellectual skews rather than genuine rational divergence.

It is often thought that the less informed a person is the more close-minded they are. I won’t deny that that is sometimes the case. Take young earth creationism (YEC). Young earth creationists' knowledge of biology, palaeontology and geology is usually very meagre – but they assent to YEC through tribal pressure and the need to proclaim piety and self-righteousness, so the epistemological side is rarely addressed with honest rigour.

However, despite examples like YEC, it isn’t always the case that the less informed a person is the more close-minded they are - sometimes proficient knowledge of a subject is what makes someone closed-minded. Quite often, people have a lot of knowledge of both sides of the argument, and that informs them more strongly of which side they are on and which views they have. For example, the more informed I became about biology, palaeontology and geology, the more close-minded I became to YEC. This plays out elsewhere too. The more informed I became about astronomy, the more close-minded I became to astrology; and the more informed I became about economics, the more close minded I became to socialism. Thus the upshot is, you’re going to find a lot of closed-mindedness in the world. Those who know lots about a subject will be close-minded to the counterfactuals that sit in opposition, and those who know little but are heavily emotionally and intellectually biased will be close-minded to views that upset their predispositions.

All that being the case, it seems that the blog writers worth reading (which is, itself, a view that widely diverges people) have a big job on their hands. They have to keep their supporters entertained and stimulated, while at the same time trying to keep their opponents interested, and gently persuade them of a better way to view situations. They have to be charismatic enough to engage with open and closed minds; and they have to conduct themselves with the knowledge that, in all likelihood, readers who most need them probably read and engage with them the least. Perhaps that's one of the big ironies of blog-writing - those that can benefit most are the same people that are predisposed to benefit least - presuming, of course, that you have something to say from which they can benefit.

* Of course, confirmation bias is just one of many human biases people have. Psychological studies over the past half century have given us compelling evidence that there are dozens of human biases that skew our thinking, and that human beings are not as rational as they like to think.

  

 

Why Politicians Are Timid When It Comes To Radical Islam

Social disengagement and being ripe to be radicalised are important in inducing terrorism, but there certainly is a correlation between (under)-developing societies and the foothold that politically-driven Islamic fundamentalism gains in those societies. Islam, being a religion with all the gravitas of a huge cult of oppressive, brain-washing nonsense preys on the kind of people for whom a free, prosperous, democratic, egalitarian society is a long way off.

But as we've seen this week with Charlie Hebdo, they adopt a playground bully approach to Western society too. At school the playground bully usually isn't tougher than every kid in the school, so he selects his victims carefully by focusing on the ones he can intimidate. Similarly, Islamic jingoists won't be able to take on nations like France, the UK and the USA in a full scale war, so they target smaller pockets of a nation, like the Charlie Hebdo offices in France, or buses and tubes in England, or skyscrapers in the USA. Terrorism is the grubbiest of all kinds of political evil; its protagonists indiscriminately kill and injure innocent civilians, and in the process destroy families that did them no harm and had nothing to do with their own nation's representatives.

Sadly, Western civilisation is very timid when it comes to standing up to Islamic thugs. One occasionally hears torpid platitudes about 'Being tough not on Islam but on Islamic fundamentalism' but there is a very real reason why the establishment won't get as tough with Islam as it needs to - it's because tough measures would bring about radical reactions in the currently more moderate Muslims, with many being edged towards a tipping point. In other words, if politicians respond to even semi-radical Islam with the contempt it deserves they would turn lots more young Muslim men towards semi-radical and radical Islam. As history shows, to assert that you are for or against something very often drives scores of radicals in the opposite direction, and it's with that fear that politicians deliberately adopt a very circumspect approach towards the influence of radical Islam.