Guess Which UK City Is Twice As Homophobic As The Others...

Here's an interesting statistic, which may also prove to be an interesting test of your intuition. A recent-ish YouGov survey asked UK respondents whether they thought in general that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’. The results showed that in the majority of regions of the UK the people who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ hovered around the 15% mark. 

Before you click on the link to find the answer, what does your intuition tell you the results were in London? What percentage of good ol' diverse, highly populated, cosmopolitan London responded with the view that homosexuality is ‘morally wrong’? Surely somewhere as diverse as London would return results of about 5-10%, wouldn't you think?

No! It turns out not to be the case: the people in London who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ turned out to be 29%, nearly double what it was in most other regions. Why might the figure be nearly double in London? My guess would be that the reason is the same reason that makes London so different from other regions in the UK - it's the diversity. Diversity, for all its qualities (and they are plentiful) probably also means more diversity of opinions that we don't share or like - including many ethnic, cultural and religious groups that don't share our tolerance, love and respect for homosexual men and women. That seems to me the most likely reason for what is a very interesting finding (see the link here). 

Don't Fear The Clusters, They Are Part Of The Natural Process Of Experimentation

There is a lot of talk in our country about how London is so markedly different from every other city in England that it's almost like a little country by itself. Because of which, politicians are always going on about trying to build up other cities to a similar status.

What they may not know is that there is a mathematical power law that explains why this phenomenon is to be expected - it's called Zipf's law, and it states that given a large sample of data, the frequency of any element of that data is at a certain size inversely proportional to its rank in a table that measures frequency, size or some similar measure.

Consider the usage of words in the English language. Zipf's law states that the most frequent word (the word 'the') will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word (the word 'of'), three times as often as the third most frequent word (the word 'and'), and so on. This is called the rank vs. frequency rule.

The same rule also holds for the distribution in rankings of cities by population - meaning if you compare the biggest city with the second biggest, city 2 is half as big as city 1, city 3 has 2/3 the population of city 2, city 50 has 49/50ths the population of city 49, and so on. We find that while it's not an exact law, by a very close approximation it holds pretty much everywhere you look - be it word frequency, city sizes, income distributions or sizes of corporations.

Compared to smaller cities, large cities show an abnormal distribution of sizes, largely because people tend to flock to big cities to improve opportunities, and for a bunch of other reasons I blogged about here.

These power laws are social laws that resemble natural laws (rather like how Kleiber's law of animals' metabolic rate proportional to their size very closely resembles a power law about how cities use resources as populations increase) - and there's no reason to be perturbed by them.

The key thing that people are gradually starting to learn is that things are generally not designed by a central planner, they evolve over time, and although they look spectacularly like they are too sophisticated to have emerged by a long process of trial and error with no end goal in sight, it is not the case.

The primary vehicle for progression is very much trial and error and experimentation, and these clusters - be they city sizes, income gaps, business growth models, or numerous other things that seem to worry the masses - should not elicit contempt or discomfiture in us; they are what occur when people make choices and when those results are measured mathematically.

Once you understand the mathematics that underwrites all those societal choices and complex interactions, you have the tools for understanding pretty much anything in the triune relationship between economics, politics and human behaviour.

Unchain Thyself

When I was a professional gambler I knew many systems, strategies and tricks to which the non-gambler's naked eye was not accustomed. Here's one that's not only a lot of fun, but one to which I can attach a powerful truism. This can be used as a real gambling exercise, an allegory for one of life's truisms, or simply as a party game that will amuse onlookers at the end of the night.  

The game

In auctioning an arbitrary sum of money, you play a game in which you are host to two willing bidders. You show the two bidders a £20 note (you can play this with any amount of money), and get them to enter rounds of bidding on the money by handing you their bids on a piece of paper, with the winning bidder receiving the £20 at the end of the bidding, and both bidders having to pay you their final bid. 

As soon as two people agree to enter the game, not only are you (the host master) almost guaranteed a profit, you'll find that it has the potential to spiral out of the bidders' comfort zones. Say John starts the game and bids £5 for the £20 prize and Pete bids £6. Both John and Pete are soon going to find out that there's not going to be a good time to pull out of the bidding. If John quits on the first round he's just lost £5 straight off, so he might as well bid £7. Similarly if Pete then drops out he loses £6 for nothing, so he might as well bid £8. 

This bidding process carries on, because neither John nor Pete can pull out without giving up £15, £16, £17 etc for nothing. Once John has bid £18 and Pete £19, John can either bid £20 and break even, or he can lose £18 for nothing. Now Pete has to decide between bidding £21 and taking a £1 loss, or pulling out and paying £19 for nothing.

This process just carries on escalating until one of the two bidders runs out of money, or reaches the point at which they want to cut their losses to avoid escalating losses. By then, as host, you've guaranteed yourself a tidy profit. Really smart people are astute enough to work out in a few seconds that this is a futile auction in which to find oneself bidding. Others tend to either chicken out, withdraw dissonantly, or end up skint.

What we can learn from the game

That was just a light-hearted look at a fun gambling game with a twist for the uninitiated. But I think this is a good instructive template for life in general. Don't enter into situations whereby you find yourself heavily invested into something that brings about a too narrow perspective or biased affiliation that impairs your judgement.

This is one reason why I've never had any strong affiliations with a political party, or any dogma-driven allegiance to top-down social management - I'm just too enamoured with individuation, because the healthy collectivism that is sought is only attainable if the minds that make up a collective conglomeration have individuated themselves. To borrow from Thoreau we must "breathe after our own fashion".

While nothing is certain, generally I think it's true to say the more ubiquitous, established and prominent the group, the harder it is to resist its gravitational pull away from your individualism. Of course, sometimes this is a good thing, particularly when the group's influence is positive, and your present internalism negative - but the key to rational discernment is to distil when it is good and bad. 

I think a good rule of thumb for being true to your own convictions is this; don't do or champion anything in the name of a group that you wouldn't do or champion as an individual - for if you do so, you become a chameleon that fades into the colours of group think, and you compromise the autonomy of individuation.

Think of how much of your supposed individualism is moulded by others - you'll find it's much more than is often realised. The subtle ways in which others shape us are plentiful - as we trade off the person inside for the role others wish us to play. The danger is that the role involves putting on a mask - and with time the mask and our own faces can become indistinguishable.

The auction scenario above is a good analogy for large groups that have this kind of sway due to prior emotional, socio-political and financial vested interests. There comes a point - be it on a pre-election party campaign, a cult, a socio-economic affiliation, or things of that kind - where what's been invested in the thrall of the collective overpowers the true quality of investing in individual liberation of mind, intellectual openness, and a relatively unbiased enquiry. 

Take a pre-election party campaign as a good example; once the party has invested so much time and financial resources into its campaign, it becomes incredibly hard to hold a balanced view. Or take the poster boys for new-wave atheism – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (sadly now deceased), PZ Myers, Sam Harris, and Dan Dennett – with so much at stake (finance, reputation, career) it is much harder for them to consider their views with as much rigour as a comparably unbiased person. The same is true of creationists, left wing extremists, right wing extremists, scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other cult-like groups – they have so much invested in their agendas that a truly open, balanced, and liberated view eludes them. Plus, as Voltaire reminds us above - "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere".

So, my general advice is this: before you even think of becoming immersed in the collective, make sure you become immersed in the liberation of your own individualism. Rescue yourself from seeking refuge in group think, or from being transfixed on the false security of cooperative agendas, and first master the essence of your own individuality. Only then will you really be a valuable part of a collective.

The Next Stage In The Evolution Of Politics

Politics has changed a lot over the centuries. The dominant form of politics used to be loosely based on a Christian flavoured notion of human representatives promoting the common good, rather like Thomas Carlyle's version of the great men, but in this case seeking a collective, objective human goal of divinely-inspired improvement.

Then, after the gradual influence of philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Mill and Rousseau, a more liberal approach was fostered, with a more symbiotic relationship between society's rights and freedoms and the state's ability to govern by respecting those qualities.

Then came the devastation of two World Wars, which was followed by the cognitively dissonant simultaneity of believing that on the one hand the wars showed just how dangerous totalitarian extreme politics can be, and on the other the huge requirement of the state in pre-empting such forces again, not to mention the reparation and rebuilding projects that were required.

In the following decades, for all sorts of reasons too involved to go into now, both narratives have become intertwined, whereby some politicians pursue what they think is the common good with top-down prescriptions, and other politicians continually look for ways to promote our freedoms.

Sometimes there is intellectual strain and emotional duress on politicians' goals when, for example, the common good is for everyone's individualism to be allowed to breathe, in cases when what is proclaimed as the moral thing to do is another attempt to infringe on our liberties, and in cases where the more liberty we have the less we should pursue notions of what I call fabricated equality (artificially trying to make positively unequal things equal).

Given that human progress occurs dialectically, it is understandable that wherever possible modern politics is always seeking to synthesise apparent theses and antitheses into a coherent narrative that draws on the best of past political ideas.

That is also why we see the main body of political parties (comprising most elected MPs in the House of Commons) occupying more of the centre ground than ever before, in many ways indistinguishable from each other, making the fringe parties that hang on the periphery (most notably: UKIP, the Green Party, and Corbyn's wing of the Labour Party) appearing somewhat heterodoxical in the modern political context.

The key thing that people are gradually starting to learn is that things are generally not designed by a central planner, they evolve over time, and although they look spectacularly like they are too sophisticated to have emerged by a long process of trial and error with no end goal in sight, it is not the case.

Once it is more widely realised that, just like organisms in biological evolution, bit-by-bit selection is the primary game in town, I think we'll begin to adjust our interpretations of a coherent political narrative towards the next stage of human evolution - the stage at which the system of state meddling is deracinated, and what's planted in its place are the seeds of understanding that human societies thrive and progress in a bottom up manner, not a top down one.

Is This The Most Confused Blogger Around?

It was the name of the blog that first grabbed my attention on a page full of links - it leapt out at me: "Capitalism Creates Poverty" - and I thought, wow, I have to take a look, because no one actually believes that capitalism created poverty, do they? Sure I know many proclaim it, but when pressing them I've never known anyone to really actually definitely believe it.

But having perused one or two of his posts, I can see this guy really does believe it - so much so that his whole raison d'etre appears to be based on the notion that capitalism is this evil, dangerous driver of people's plight.

Alas, all the time this guy's base fallacy endures, he's always going to be peddling the wrong propaganda. What he needs to learn is that capitalism, or the market as we'll call it, is not an overarching sentience, it is an amoral descriptive term that simply describes the aggregation of everybody's wants and needs. The only concern of the market is what humans value, which is discovered by what they demand, who can supply it, and at what price.

If we demand recycled metal, the market will see to it that someone provides it; if we demand machines to draw out cash from our bank accounts, someone will provide it. The free market doesn't do anything to people, it simply provides what people demand.

It is, therefore literally impossible for the free market to make people poor, or cause poverty, as many confused people claim. It is the places in which the free market hasn't yet taken effect that poverty arises - it is the lack of the free market that causes poverty, just as it is the lack of food that causes hunger.

Someone else growing their own food is not the cause of a starving person's hunger in the next village, because that person was hungry beforehand. Of course, a person who shares the food they've grown, or better, teaches his neighbour how to grow his own food has helped alleviate his neighbour's hunger, but he has not caused the hunger, because they were both hungry before they learned to grow food.

The World Bank defines absolute poverty as anyone in the world who lives on less than $1.90 a day. It's true that most people live on more than that, and that unfortunately there are still too many people that currently still haven't escaped absolute poverty, but what you have to remember is that poverty is the natural state of human beings for pretty much all of the past 200,000 years of our existence.

The primary difference between someone in poverty and someone well off is a matter of productivity. It is not a matter of one getting a huge slice of pie and the other getting a tiny proportion, it is that there are two pies and they are different sizes. The free market helps the guy with the smaller pie by enabling him to be more productive, but it requires some co-operation with people that have bigger pies.

Try asking the question in the opposite way

We are constantly hearing columnists and social commentators enquiring about why the poorest people in the world are still poor when so many people have become so prosperous (relatively speaking) in comparison. It's a vital question, and one of which we should be mindful every day.

But an equally interesting question is the opposite one: why, in fact, are so many people so prosperous? You see, prosperity is not the default state of human beings - poverty and hardship is. For most of our history we have been struggling through poverty and hardship.

The story of human history for the past 200,000 years goes roughly like this. For the past 199,800 of those 200,000 years we had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitivism, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality.

People’s earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes in more recent times) until something came along to change all that in the nineteenth century. What happened was that people started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly (it’s still going on).

What caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression was primarily two things – science and capitalism. This science and capitalist-based progression can be explained by a simple rule of thumb – people innovate, improve and provide answers to problems – and the more people, the more innovation, improvements and problems solved.

The more ideas and the more people to share those ideas with, the more humans prosper, and the quicker they do so, despite some unstable or resource-insufficient areas where high population is proving to be an issue.

Now let’s be clear; science and capitalism haven’t created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects – but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years of human history than in the previous 199,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, science, technological capacity, and overall well-being have improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it.

Science and capitalism show themselves to be good vehicles for human progression, beneficial tools for lifting us out of poverty, curing diseases, feeding the impoverished, communicating globally, and generally enhancing our knowledge of the world. Given that out of the last 200,000 years we have only been out of poverty for 0.1% of it, the question we hardly ever hear regarding why so many of us are so prosperous must at least have equal consideration to the widespread, repeated question of why so many are still in poverty.

The answer to that question is, in the simplest terms, that quite naturally in the event of a progression-explosion there were always going to be countries that had the right conditions and personnel to experience these changes in fortune first. Many economists will simply argue that these countries still in poverty need to be opened up more to the global market.

This is true, and they certainly have the natural resources to do so. But I think that's only half the battle - the other side of it is the science. Countries that have resources to trade but with poor scientific potential will probably be the ones to reach prosperity last, particularly given that scientific capabilities involve a lot of investment from government.

As has happened in the past 150 years in the UK and USA, and as had happened more recently in about a fifth of the time in places like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong, developing countries get a foot on the ladder of prosperity and begin to become more open to the vital market forces of globalisation that will bring them economic growth and increased prosperity.

Many developing nations haven’t had their progression-explosion yet – and yet even though they have many resources with which to trade, if they lack the political stability, social conditions, capacity for trading more freely (not to mention being beset by religious jingoism), they may carry on lacking the essential scientific acumen that accompanies capitalism, and as a consequence, they may well take a while yet to climb out of the quagmire.

Once upon a time, the kind of hardships seen in India and Bangladesh now were seen in the UK then. We in the UK once used to be an underdeveloped country too. But as we saw the increased growth of capital, the advancements in technology, and the increased opportunity to trade and innovate, we and several other leading countries gradually climbed out of poverty and hardship into greater wealth and prosperity, and are subsequently being joined by many other countries, with many more to come.

Getting The Discrimination Balance Right

Combating racism is one of the most essential things humans do, and like every case of seeking the common good, it is a work in progress. Sadly as the actions of some minorities after the EU referendum result confirmed, we still have a way to go yet.

But that's not what this blog post is about - pretty much everyone knows what I said above, and everyone worth their salt is all for kicking racism out of society.

No, the purpose of this blog post is to say that when it comes to racism and discrimination, and indeed other forms of supposed unfairness in society, progress doesn't just mean weeding these things out of society, it also means not going so far the other way that we become trepid little mice unable to cope with a world in which a lot of our discrimination is good and necessary (a danger that is starting to materialise in many pockets of society).

Take, for example, something that happened a couple of months ago, when the BBC sought to target supposedly “under-represented” parts of Britain with an internship that white people were not permitted to apply for.

In order to “rectify the imbalance of people who do not recruit black and Asian people”, only black, Asian and non-white ethnic minorities could apply for the BBC internship, despite it emerging later that the corporation is already scoring above what is expected of them in that area of diversity.

The way things are going, there is a real danger that the prejudice and unfair discrimination accusers will swing things round 180 degrees and cry foul against people accused of discrimination for not discriminating. Make sense? If not, here's what I mean.

If we carry on like this, I can envisage a time when there is widespread paranoia that unfair discrimination is occurring whenever there is, say, a TV drama show without a certain number of Muslims and homosexuals, or a university without a certain number of black graduates, or when a police force has more than a 50% proportion of white officers, or when there is a Cabinet consisting of more of one sex than the other.  

With some degree of irony, the unfair discrimination cards that we used to nobly play against genuine injustices are starting to make appearances as faux-discrimination cards played by discriminators against those accused of not discriminating enough.

The antidote to this shift is to realise that most discrimination is actually perfectly fine, and actually to be encouraged, because the majority of the time when we discriminate we do so because we understand the trade off better than our accusers.

Don't get me wrong, where there is still genuine unfair discrimination we should help weed it out. But genuine unfair discrimination doesn't occur half as much as most people think - it is simply the result of people making rational choices, like choosing a Cabinet or a work force based on merit, not on sex or skin colour.

Rational discrimination occurs everywhere, and for good reason. At school in wanting to date girls I fancied, I was discriminating against girls I didn't fancy. But that's perfectly okay. When I go to the pub I want to sit and talk with friends I know, and discriminate against strangers by not joining them at their table. But that's perfectly okay too.

Vegetarians want to discriminate against burger bars by not eating in them; lesbians want to discriminate against heterosexual men by not having sex with them; women usually want to discriminate against employers that run garages by not working for them; economic think tanks want to discriminate against not very bright people by having bright people contribute to their research; and the Congolese social group in my city wants to discriminate against non-Congolese people by only wanting fellow Congolese people to attend - and all of those things are perfectly fine.

Not only are the majority of our life's discriminations fine, but even at times when certain patterns appear to be evident people should first check to see if there are other good reasons for this before making accusations of 'unfair discrimination'.

Or in other words, they should adhere to the wisdom of Chesterton's fence. That is, if you see a fence somewhere that you think is doing no good, don't pull it down until you've first understood why someone built it in the first place. Only when you're sure the fence is serving no beneficial purpose should you pull it down.

The same is true of the many cases where there aren't more of a certain type of person in those roles - instead of assuming a system isn't working fairly, you have to instead consider why it doesn't already work in the way you assume it should (something our Prime Minister Theresa May failed to learn when she was Home Secretary) .

Because the thing is, quite often you'll many of those patterns are not cases of unfair discrimination at all - they are simply a reflection of a wide society made up of individual choices bootstrapped by rational assessments of taste and merit.

Ask The Philosophical Muser

Since increasing my readership over the past couple of years, through a growing following, but also in no small part due to high(er) profile writing elsewhere, I've not been short of interesting enquiries in the form of comments, questions well worth answering, or even on occasion requests for advice regarding matters of daily life. Even as we speak, I have one or two interesting enquiries from readers that might make good future blog posts.

With that in mind, I thought I'd mention, dear readers, that if it helps or adds anything to your life in any way, you are quite welcome to ask any questions on any subject you like, or even ask advice, whereby if it's witty, intriguing or intelligent enough for public consumption, I'd be willing to make a blog post on it (with the questioner remaining anonymous if preferred).  

You can either email me (email address at the bottom), or if you prefer message me on Facebook, and excepting a few conditions below, you may well find your question becomes a new blog post.

* Please don't ask me to do homework, coursework or an assignment for you. No reader or blogger is interested in that.

* Before asking something, please check the *Labels* section on the right side-bar, as that topic may well have been covered before on here.

 

* There's no point asking a question about facts or information that you'd be better off typing in Google.

* Please keep your question short. You have a better chance of getting an answer if your question would comfortably fit on a post-it note.

As always, thanks for reading.

j.knight423@btinternet.com

 

What Democracy Throws Up

In this morning's papers is the news that an extreme Icelandic party called the Pirate party looks set to form the next government. We Brits have had our own issues with democracy recently after the EU Referendum, as I'm sure will Americans if Donald Trump becomes President, and as have many other people in the Middle East and north Africa in the past few years.

There are lots of issues with democracy, but perhaps the main one is that predominant support means that undesirable things can come to pass if it is desired by enough people to make it democratically viable (stay tuned to the end and we'll ask one or two big philosophical questions about allowing the public to decide important things).

One thing democracy throws up is this. Suppose we have Tom, Dick and Harry and £100. A vote for Tom and Dick to have £50 each and Harry to have nothing could easily be favoured democratically on a 2 to 1 basis. Tom and Dick are happy, and Harry is not.

But now suppose Harry offers an alternative to Tom; Tom gets £60 and Harry gets £40. Dick is unhappy, he gets nothing, but Tom is £10 better off than before, and Harry is £40 better off. Naturally, this second proposal could easily be favoured democratically on a 2 to 1 basis too. In response Dick proposes a fifty-fifty split between him and Harry.

Now Dick is back up to £50, and Harry is now £10 up on the last proposal, which could mean a revised 2 to 1 vote, this time at the expense of Tom. As you can probably gather, this process could go on and on, as it follows the same rule: that predominant support makes situations come to pass democratically.

As the old adage goes, if democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch, democracy isn't great for everyone. And as I pointed out in this Blog a while back, in many cases of political policy in the present age the rich are quite often the lambs, and the rest of the population are the wolves with their tablecloths and knives and forks at the ready:

"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."

Should we always trust the public?
So, to finish - what's been evident is that the Brexit vote has regurgitated issues about democracy that the Greek philosophers used to debate, but which have now taken on a modern context. The following, perfectly reasonable questions now loom large:

1) Are the general public always the best people to ask about big, far-reaching decisions that the majority are probably ill-equipped to understand?

2) When a national referendum is actioned, should democracy always be respected in terms of going with the majority opinion?

3) Under which conditions might we be able to justifiably argue to overturn a democratic decision made by the public?

Regarding question 1, knowing the general public I'd suggest the answer is, not always. However, political intelligence must also involve the mental adroitness to avoid placing the nation in a terribly precarious situation by not having referendums on matters where the 'wrong' outcome would be a disaster.

Regarding 2, I'd answer mostly yes, but I could conceive of occasions when the answer would be no.

Regarding 3, carrying on from 2, where I could conceive of occasions when we could justifiably overturn a democratic decision made by the public would be when the majority opinion was likely to be so harmful and damaging and idiotic that democracy needs a few voices of reason to straighten things out. For example, suppose we ended up with a scenario where the majority of the country voted to make the UK a protectionist nation with no outside trade, or a scenario where the majority of the country voted to ban all immigration into the country, or a scenario where the majority of the country voted for the UK to be governed by an Islamic theocracy - they are cases where even something like the quality of democracy shouldn't have ultimate primacy on the matter.

The upshot of all this, I suppose, is that the key to governments holding referendums is that the ramifications of either result should be intelligently and thoroughly thought through, and therefore referendums should only be offered to the public if one of the possible outcomes was not thought by (presumably) Parliament to be too disastrous for the country (which I admit is a subjective thing in itself).

  

Introducing The Hyperbolsters

A defining characteristic of quite a few public personalities is that they latch on to partial truths but then take to hyperbole or mental excessiveness to attain their public cachet and court some kind of recognition. You know the sort I mean; you listen to them and can recognise that some of what they say represents a grain of truth, but that the whole quintessence of their rhetoric just makes their overall persona seem somewhat counter-productive in the debate. I call them the 'hyperbolsters'. Examples of the hyperbolster personality would be people like Peter Hitchens, George Galloway, David Starkey. Richard Dawkins, most in the Green Party, a few of the ultra hard feminists and of course, our old friend Jeremy Corbyn.

Hyperbolsters identify smidgens of truth - like, for example, some immigration problems, the need for wealth redistribution, bad foreign policy, parts of the country in slight declension, and bad elements found in religion, to name just a few, but greatly exaggerate the reality of those truths or greatly exaggerate the extent to which their own personal commentary gets to the heart of the matter and accounts for the complexity of the issues.

Even someone like that EDL chap Tommy Robinson picked a crumb of truth - that this government is quite supine when it come to dealing with Islamic fundamentalism - and turned it into something headline-grabbing.

I'd place Nigel Farage in the hyperbolster category, although he’s hyperbolic-lite rather than the full flavour variety. Over the years he's generated lots of support by identifying two key issues (immigration and the EU) that the other parties had always addressed poorly, and he's used them as vehicles for persistently gathering political momentum, as well as picking up support from quite a few protest voters along the way. In Farage's case, of course, all this culminated in achieving the end result (Brexit) that he set out to achieve from about 1993 onwards. 

That is how hyperbolstering grows from individuals to party-size groups, and UKIP are the most mainstream case in point. Hyperboslters multiply into parties by adhering to the political art of gauging the societal landscape, by identifying which tenets of domestic life certain sub-sections of the electorate care about but feel isn't addressed well enough by other parties, and then by creating a representative party that can promise such policies, while remaining far enough outside the mainstream to ensure they are unlikely to ever have to deliver them.

While this post is about hyperbolsters in general, not Nigel Farage, I think history will show that Farage's legacy will go down as one of those rare cases when hyperbolstering survived the fringes and embedded itself into the mainstream. As for the majority of hyperbolsters out there, if you happen to be a fan, don't pin too much hope on them.

What's The Biggest Factor In Your Success? I'll Give You A Clue: It's Not Your Sex, Age, Intelligence, Height, Good Looks, Family Background, Education, Skin Colour Or Even Your Hard Work!

Apart from as a token term, there isn't really any such thing as 'luck' in the world. Of course we ascribe fortune to events in retrospect: "It was fortunate that there was a parking space when Jack had only 5 minutes to spare before a job interview" or "Lucky there happened to be a doctor in the pub when Hilda became ill", but that's more aptly described as circumstances going our way. Luck and fortune are merely synonyms for a world in which chance occurs due to incomplete knowledge.

To the greatest extent we make our own luck in the world, but if there's one thing that could best be determined as a fortune indicator it is one's place of birth in the world. Whatever we want to call it - chance, fortune or luck - the most significant fact about you that underpins the probability of how your life will turn out is probably your place of birth.

That is to say, people have all sorts of ways of determining their successes and failures in life, plus lots of things beyond their control. But the biggest determiner that most profoundly affects humans' ability and opportunity to determine their successes and failures in life is their country of birth, because one's country of birth plays such a huge factor in facilitating these things.

That's not to deny that all sorts of human qualities are important, nor that our education, family background and hard work are key ingredients. One can't even deny that having many of the traits mentioned in the title are advantageous. But where you're born in the world is the primary determiner that determines to what extent all the aforementioned qualities and traits get a chance to play out into your success.

Whether you're born in, say, Bolton or Cambridge, there are not many barriers to fulfilling your potential compared to, say, whether you're born in England or North Korea (or Pakistan, or Somalia, or Burma). The determination gulf is much wider cross-nationally.

It's About Time We Talked About Fracking

After declaring that the government she leads will always be driven by "the interests of the many ordinary families for whom life is harder than many people in politics realise", Prime Minister Theresa May wants to ensure that families affected by fracking get a share of any money earned.

In effect it's a partial market solution to a problem of ownership of gas, ownership of land, and allocation of resources and funds - but it's not a solution that solves the problem that anti-frackers have, who won't settle for what they consider to be meagre gestures of financial recompense. It is that problem I will address here.

As everyone in this country knows very well, fracking is quite a divisive topic, with those opposed to it unlikely to change their minds as opposition to it is bound up in their group identity.

For me, with no group identity, when it comes to fracking I don’t actually have a dog in this fight – I think it’s a little too early to tell. As always I come to the proposition with an open enough mind to see how it plays out and whether the net benefits outweigh the net costs.

Because yes of course there are costs and downsides to fracking, but obviously there are potential benefits too - not least the fact that there is approximately 1300 trillion cubit feet of shale gas on our land - which is more than 500 years' worth of gas for the UK (not that we'll need that much).

The general feeling in the green camp tends to be one of alarmism: swallowing scare stories and off-the-peg media junk through the fear of any kind of tearing of the sacred holy veil of Gaia.

A better approach would be to say, if it turns out that the benefits outweigh the costs, then great, I’ll support it. If the opposite, then I’ll be first to speak out against it. But rather than foolishly swallowing something whole and trying to digest it slowly, it’s much better to nibble away at it and see how the empirical process plays out.

A few objections are levelled at fracking - that it is an environmentally unfriendly method of sourcing, and that is can cause little earthquakes.

There is no such thing as being an unfriendly method of sourcing energy, just as there is no such thing as a single price of a banana. The quality of being unfriendly is a relative term.

Fracking may turn out to be unfriendly compared to solar energy, but quite friendly compared to coal or oil. Besides, whether it's environmentally 'friendly' or not is only a small part of the picture, because the bigger issue is to do with utility, practicality and saleability.

As for the issue of fracking possibly causing little earthquakes - so what? This may possibly be an argument against fracking, but it's not obvious that it is, because it may not be.

In fact, given that shattering earthquakes that cause damage on a large scale have hypocenters far far deeper than the depths reached by drilling and then pumping water underground, it may actually be the case that those small dissipations of energy, in causing a few little earthquakes, reduce the number of large scale ones. 

Our progress towards using more renewables ought to be dependent on the consumers, and on whether it is beneficial to do so. Solar seems like it has much more of a future than wind, for example - in fact, I feel quite certain that in half a century henceforward the people of that time will be looking back at us and wondering what the heck we thought all the fuss was about.

Shale providers, like solar and oil providers, earn their living by how much the consumers feel the energy is worth at meeting their demand for warm houses, cooked food, and so on.

If there is a large social payoff to fracking for consumers - as measured, as usual, by what consumers are willing to pay - but nobody is fracking to meet this demand, other suppliers in search of a business venture will start solving the missing shale gas problem, rewarded by the payoffs of the revenue per cubic foot that is aligned with the benefit to customers. That is precisely how society should decide which energy sources should be predominant.

Life's gradual progression is very rarely a planned one (although to the naked eye it can easily give the appearance of being more 'designed' than it actually is) - it is a cumulative process that comes as a result of millions of ideas and exchanges going on in a trial and error process.

Discussions about things like fracking should never be alarmist where folk only fear the losses of some elements of the equation; it should be with the view that whichever provides the net benefit to society is the one that should be considered with most favour.

Geologists tell us that there are large amounts of gas locked into shales below the nation's floor, and it is common knowledge that less than 10% of our land is urbanised, so there is plenty of scope to install drilling rigs around the country if the benefits outweigh the costs.

Of course, this issue isn't helped by the fact that in the UK (unlike in America) pretty much all onshore natural resources like oil and gas are owned by the State, which means the Ricardian principle of land rent site being equal to the economic advantage obtained by it for its most productive use is likely to be sub-optimal.

What is needed, ideally, are proper allocations, whereby people whose land is shale gas rich can benefit from it (if they choose) - subject to consideration of the externalities (neighbours, locals) - as can all consumers who can buy cheaper gas. If it's done intelligently, then the costs of drilling for shale gas will be concentrated in areas of investors/providers, with benefits being widely distributed to consumers.

Generally speaking, though, I'm afraid there is too much lazy thinking when it comes to many of these 'controversial' topics - as there are a vast number of people who tendentiously operate on a kind autopilot logic of "If x involves some costs then we must not entertain x" - when, of course, in the real world, everything has some costs, because everything is a trade off - if you get less or more of something you get more or less of something else. If we discontinued everything that has costs we'd discontinue everything full stop

So fracking may be a bad idea, but it may be the case that people getting inexpensive energy, pensioners being affordably warm in winter, and low earners being able to cook without being petrified of opening the gas bill are worth what may be turn out to be tiny fusses over very little.

If we don't capitalise on the potential for more efficient energy provisions, we are effectively saying we don't prefer cheaper energy, which is exactly the same as saying we prefer more expensive energy, which is the same as admitting that we don't want to make life better for many people.

Moreover, if we don't capitalise on the ability to drill for gas one would presume it means we'll use more coal and oil for the same energy requirements, which one would have thought is contrary to the greens' aims as it will be worse for the environment (particularly as extraction costs for shale gas will surely be a lot less than in the oil industry).

The Government Is Electricity When It Comes To The Bathtub Of Banking

Worried about a potential nose-diving economy that is very unlikely to materialise (and long-term almost certainly won't), the quasi-governmental Bank of England’s basic rate is being lowered from 0.5% to 0.25%, with the actual UK government — driven here by Theresa May and Philip Hammond - favouring a scheme to force the banks to pass on lower interest rates to businesses in the hope of injecting new lifeblood in the small business sector and a borrowing system that favours them.

This is a big mistake because it treats both risk factors and interest rates as though they are mere numbers without important supply and signals attached to them. Generally, if savings are in scarce supply but there is a high demand for borrowing, then interest rates will rise.

This will reduce demand for borrowing (because with compound interest borrowing is expensive) but it will also increase the incentive for savers (because people who save will get a better return on their money).

As more money is saved, more capital becomes available to be loaned out, and the price (that is, the interest rate) will fall, making borrowing more enticing, and increasing demand for loans. Just like with any consumable good - cars, garden plants, laptops and oranges, the price of borrowing fluctuates in order that as closely as possible it matches savings supply with the credit demand.

Consequently, interest rates provide signals regarding the extent to which people are willing to forgo something in the present for something more desired in the future. So interest is basically a tax on borrowing, and factoring risk is an evaluation of the probability of a borrower defaulting on a loan.

There are two principal problems with the government's approach to this; one to do with artificially adjusted risk and the other to do with artificially adjusted prices of borrowing.

To take the second one first, when interest rates are lowered a lot of keen borrowers come along to capitalise. To satisfy this demand the Bank of England must increase the money supply, which drives up prices.

As people are borrowing to consume goods, not to store money, they will need more money, which the Bank of England must respond to with a further increase in the money supply, which further drives up prices, and round and round we go.

And when we have artificially adjusted risk, businesses are started up without the requisite risks of their failure factored in to the terms of the loan. A scheme that artificially favours small businesses avoids the mild deflation that brings about the healthy bankruptcy of insolvent businesses and the roadblock to future insolvent ones starting up in the first place.

Suppose a magic genie appeared to you and told you tonight's winning lottery numbers. One thing you wouldn't do is announce those numbers to everyone you know. Knowing they are worth a fortune to you, you'd select those numbers on a ticket, pay your £1 and become a millionaire at the weekend.  If you can make a logical connection - this makes matters clear on why governments pressuring banks to loan to small businesses is a bad idea.  

This harks back to the crazy days of Ed Miliband who very much wanted to establish a network of regional banks to lend to local businesses, based on supposed findings from the Small Business Taskforce that innovation is being inhibited due to the lack of bank-lending.  Because of the drop in bank-lending, his party, along with the Liberal Democrats, were keen to drive banks into a greater state of lending. This was a terrible idea then, and it still is now.

If a prospective business has the qualities to make it lucrative for investors then a bank will miss an opportunity to profit by not lending to the business. The obvious corollary is; if after an assessment a bank is not wilfully invested in a prospective business, it must believe that the project lacks the qualities to make it a lucrative, profit-making venture.  Hence, when politicians pressurise banks to lend to businesses they are often forcing them to invest in projects they believe to have a low chance of engendering profit. 

If you take the logic to its natural level, by proposing legislation that imposes compulsory lending from banks the government forgoes a great opportunity to make a profit by not capitalising on these opportunities themselves, rather like how a man who knows next Saturday’s wining lottery numbers forgoes a greater profit by telling everyone the numbers ahead of the draw. 

Instead of passing any such legislation or temporary duress, the government could hire people to invest in all these innovative schemes and channel the profits into good and profitable services for the benefit of the taxpayer.  That it doesn't, suggests that the government doesn't think these prospective businesses are worth investing in after all - which makes it crazy that they should force banks to do so.

This also makes it clear why not only is government interference in the markets often harmful - it also demonstrates why governments loaning to businesses that can't get a loans from the bank is unwise. What ought to be obvious is that if a bank isn't lending to a business it must think it has better ventures in which to invest. Alas, this seems not be obvious to a number of our politicians. 

Take Hopeful Harry who has been refused a bank loan for his prospective retail business.  What are the chances that Harry knows better than the bank about how to invest their money?  Very small; after all, as far as Harry is concerned the only perceived use of the money is to have it invested in his business. But as far as the bank is concerned, it has knowledge of all the alternatives that Harry doesn't know about, making the chances of Harry's business being the best prospective investment vanishingly small. 

If Harry has approached numerous potential investors and been turned down, it would be economic madness for the government to invest in Harry's business on the back of this.  In loaning to Harry - and businesses like his - the government has harmed society because it has invested money in ventures that are less conducive to success than the alternatives.

An economy in which investors are risking their own money has greater invectives for profit and economic mobility than when a government is risking the taxpayers' money.  Green tax breaks and eco-subsidies are not all they've cracked up to be either, as they interfere in the free market by gearing entrepreneurs towards ventures that factor in government subsidy rather than assenting completely to the mechanism of matching supply to demand.

When politicians tell you that the financial crisis occurred because banks were left to their own devices, they are speaking the opposite of the truth - the incentive to gamble is usually (and was in this case) greatest when excessive risks are not met with collapse but with government bail outs.

I'm not saying that when the public's money is at risk the State shouldn't have safety mechanisms in place - but the financial crisis largely came about because there were too few incentives to stop banks taking risks. Prior to the financial crisis banks were taking so much risk precisely because they were bootstrapped by government subsidies to the tune of hundreds of billions.

When the likes of Cameron, Osborne, Cable and Miliband complained about how irresponsible and greedy the bankers were - they were without perhaps knowing it also complaining about how much the bankers responded to government subsidies.  That is like a man who has paid a tattooist to tattoo him complaining that the tattooist has ruined his unblemished skin by indelibly marking it with the design. 

A healthy bank will protect everyday citizens' savings that are tied up in their accounts and offer customers security against the loss of their savings. Consequently, depositors' concern about the security of their money and their discernment in choosing with whom to deposit and invest is a necessary part of a well functioning competitive banking system.

It’s the removal of this that contributes to the banks’ propensity for excessive risk – for if customers deposited their money based on knowledge of a bank’s history of sound and consistent investment, then all the better for them and for the banking market.

And an important part of this security of borrowing and investment is bound up in the fact that as near as possible banks must allow interest rates to find their level by the mechanisms of supply and demand, and they must only loan to businesses that they've assessed as being highly probably solvent in the next few years and (hopefully) decades henceforward.

The Answer To The So-Called 'Inequality' Problem Is Not More Equality

Today the Wall Street Journal has pointed us to lots of research to show why there is no empirical evidence for Thomas Piketty’s highly flawed inequality theory being correct. Naturally this blog's author doesn't find that in the least bit surprising - I wrote my own critique of Piketty's ideas in 2014, which also came to those same conclusions.

Often people's intentions are noble and their goals are good, but their ideas on how to achieve those things are defected with fantasy. With Piketty's notions of inequality, however, the intentions and goals aren't even that worthwhile either, because we don't much need more equality - what we actually need is more freedom.

One of the most significant cultural memes in our modern society is the egalitarian one that obsesses about making an unequal world artificially more equal. What we should strive to improve more than anything is not equality, it is freedom.

Those who place a higher premium on equality over freedom miss one of the most vital things about being human - that as well as our similarities in terms of human qualities, it is our differences that engender the variety of things that make us prosper. Consequently, if you artificially impede some freedoms for the purposes of greater equality you impede the diversity that drives people's striving for progress.

For it is precisely those different tastes and abilities that give exhibition to the choices we make in creating such a diverse society and a diverse economy. It is because of these vast differences that people co-operate in trade, and it is because of this collective co-operation that people are incentivised to strive for innovation.

Consequently, then, what people striving for greater income equality ought to be striving for is greater opportunity, because it is opportunity that engenders value, and it is value that increases absolute well-being. Life is about ideas, and putting those ideas into practice. This involves a continual trial and error process best enjoyed when freedom enables it.

One of the most oppressive things that can be demanded in society is when people try to make equal, things that are better off unequal. We are equal only to the extent that we are all uniquely different and better for it. The celebration of and striving for optimal diversity is the antidote against the medicine of fabricated equality.

And I say 'optimal diversity' precisely because although we can have too little equality, such as in cases where opportunity is needlessly limited for some groups, we can also have too much diversity, such as in cases where a departure from a desired uniformity is socially and individually damaging (see here and here for more on this).

Let's Face It, Human Intelligence Is Boltzmannian As Well As Gaussian

In terms of how intelligence is distributed across the nation, people often assume a normal distribution - the familiar Gaussian bell curve of intelligence - because that’s the shape used in IQ scoring. But that curve is constructed, not discovered. IQ tests are norm‑referenced: the scoring system forces the results into a bell curve so that 68% fall within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% within two, and 99.7% within three. That’s a property of the measurement, not necessarily of the underlying phenomenon.

If instead we look not at measured cognitive ability but at applied intelligence - the extent to which people actually use their cognitive potential - the distribution across the UK seems to me far more skewed. In fact, it resembles something closer to an exponentially decaying curve. Not a literal Boltzmann distribution (which applies to particles in thermal equilibrium), but a curve with the same shape: heavily weighted toward the lower end, with a long, thin tail of high performers.

The analogy is this: if the y‑axis is number of people and the x‑axis is degree of applied intelligence, then very few people sit at the extreme high end, a moderate number occupy the middle, and a very large proportion cluster toward the lower end. Replace particles with people and energy with cognitive engagement, and I think you get a surprisingly good metaphor for everyday experience.

So, for example, on a scale of 1–100, where 1 is very low applied intelligence and 100 represents the most brilliant minds, my experience suggests that the vast majority of the UK population sits below 50, with a very large proportion below 25. Roughly - and these figures may need slight adjustment, but not much - the distribution might look like this:

1–25 (50%) 
26–50 (30%) 
51–75 (15%) 
76–100 (5%)

This is not a bell curve. Compare it to height or weight. Height is approximately Gaussian because most adults fall between 4ft 9 and 6ft 7, with relatively few outliers. Weight is more skewed, but still clusters around a central tendency. Applied intelligence, however, does not seem to follow the same pattern. And although democratic and egalitarian instincts encourage people to believe otherwise, everyday observation suggests a very different landscape.

What makes this even more interesting is that many skewed, exponentially decaying distributions in human behaviour arise from biased random walks. A random walk occurs when outcomes are shaped by many small, independent influences. For example, take nightclub attendance in Norwich city centre in 2016. Suppose there is a group that regularly parties down Prince of Wales Road, averaging to some value n.

Over a month - say July - each member may or may not go out. If someone goes out, that’s a step to the right (+1). If they stay home, that’s a step to the left (-1). Over time, these independent decisions produce something resembling a random walk. But because exogenous factors exist - post‑Christmas fatigue, hot summer weekends, bank holidays, major events - the walk becomes biased. The result is a distribution that may look bell‑shaped but is not perfectly symmetrical.

Applied intelligence behaves similarly. It is influenced by countless factors: motivation, environment, education, culture, opportunity, personality, stress, health, and so on. These influences do not push equally in both directions. They bias the walk toward lower engagement. And unlike height or weight, there is no natural “restoring force” pulling people toward the mean.

This is why applied intelligence ends up looking like a skewed distribution rather than a Gaussian one. Not because intelligence itself obeys thermodynamic laws - it doesn’t, of course - but because human behaviour often follows power‑law or Pareto‑like patterns, where a small minority produce most of the high‑end output. The curve is steep on the left and thin on the right because cognitive engagement is limited, unevenly distributed, and subject to many downward‑pulling influences.

The upshot is, measured intelligence is Gaussian because the scoring system enforces it. But applied intelligence - the degree to which people use their cognitive potential - is not. It is heavily skewed toward the low end, shaped by biased behavioural dynamics, and resembles an exponentially decaying curve far more than a bell curve.