My Social Media Policy

 

I'm just bashing this out, more like streams of consciousness than a formal essay - but I’ve never liked all the bile and nastiness on social media, and I've tried my best over the years not to add to it. My policy tends to be, if I haven’t got anything positive to say, I’d rather avoid commenting than add to the negativity. I generally endeavour to make my points in the most encouraging and generous way I can, and I’ve tried to be even better at that in the past few years. This means, though, that if anything I post does ever seem harshly critical, you can be assured that I have tried to carefully consider the position from the other side, and have still found it inexcusable and deserving of reproach.

I also try very hard not to be personally unkind. It’s perfectly fine to judge what people say, and the claims they make – political, economic, religious or otherwise, because you’re playing the ball not the man. When someone utters a proposition, they are putting it out there and inviting a response from others. When people live their lives, and the mistakes and flaws that go with them, they are not.

As the old maxim goes, great minds talk about ideas, and small minds talk about people.

I’m saying this to make a wider comment, that I believe we should:

1) Do our best not to judge other people – we usually don’t really know enough of what we need to know to make a sound judgement.

Why on earth would you think it wise to judge people you know almost nothing about, where what you do know has usually been given to you via a narrow and biased media source? Consider what it says about you if can see no issue with this kind of judgementalism.

And:

2) Pay much more attention to those who are preoccupied with trying to positively change themselves, and much less attention to those who are preoccupied with trying to change others.

Of course, as we all know deep down, criticising others is usually an avoidance tool, to evade the personal responsibility required to address our own faults and wrongdoings, and positively change ourselves. It’s much easier and less courageous to point out what’s wrong in others, and let ourselves off the hook. And there is enough thought and energy required in sorting ourselves out to last a lifetime. Those who hunger most for wisdom have very little time or inclination to point out what else is wrong with the world - there is enough to do sorting oneself out.

Some Truths About Team Management

Traditional management literature has it that team performance tends to follow a bell curve distribution, with the majority of the team being mid-range, a few at the low end and a few up at the high end. That is, most of your colleagues are likely to not deviate too far from the mean (being fairly good performers), with a minority being at each tail end (a few exceptionally good performers and a few exceptionally bad performers).

There is some degree of accuracy in the bell curve statistics, but a higher resolution analysis reveals the distribution to more closely follow a power law, with much greater variation, where a small number of team members are extraordinarily high performers, a large number are fairly good performers, and a small minority are very poor performers. Here the mean becomes less important, because the extraordinarily high performers are disproportionately more influential in the team (or company) than the rest combined.

This phenomenon is closely related to Price’s law, which states that around 50% of some kind of human output comes from the square root of the total amount of human output. In a typical company, 50% of the work (where work = creative influence) is done by the square root of the total number of people in the company. If your company has 10 people, about 3 of them are probably responsible for 50% of the output; if your company has 10,000 employees, then about 100 of them are going to be about half as influential as the rest of the workforce combined.

The difference between a normal distribution and a power law distribution is usually related to the underlying engine of the system in terms of dynamics. For example, normal distributions have constraints that impede very rapid growth over a short space of time, whereas power laws do not have the same impediments. In team management, this accentuates the advantage of having a few hyper performers – they are the ones who will be disproportionately more influential and beneficial to your operation, and they are the ones on whom you as a manger should divert most of your attention.

Unfortunately, the industry model and societal ethos is geared towards the opposite approach (especially in the public sector), where a disproportionate amount of time and resources are spent on under-achievers and people performing badly, while many of the top performers are given too little attention or regard for their contributions and achievements. The excessive time and resources spent on the under-achievers incurs opportunity costs in the shape of valuable time not being spent on your hyper-achievers. Remember, your under-achievers are holding back your team far more than they are advancing it. You should do just enough to stop them holding back progress, and focus more of your attention on the most valuable contributors.

And if your under-achievers still can’t thrive after being given several chances, you should adopt the ‘fail it fast’ method and terminate their contract. Don’t allow them to remain in post a day longer than they ought to be. There are many good reasons why, but here are the two best. The first is that your under-performers are taking up valuable places in your team that could be occupied by hyper-performers. The second is that it’s actually not good for your under-performers to be in roles in which they are not thriving. In other words, it’s better for them (as well as everyone else) if they are moved on to a role in which they can thrive, because they will be more content and more productive, and your remaining team members will be much better off too. 

Present Bad Interferences To Correct Past Bad Interferences

I know that not everyone is on board with this, but it really is true that most of our economic messes are caused by governments interfering in things they don’t understand competently enough, and by rival politicians (either in the same party, or in opposition) trying to fix the bad interventions with other bad interventions that both exacerbate the original messes, and create new messes at the same time. 

To use a DIY analogy, Dave decides to drill a hole in the wall to put up a picture, but goes through an electric cable, causes a short circuit and starts a small fire; Jenny tries to put it out, but leaves damaged walls that Frank comes round to replaster and paint afresh. In doing so, Frank bashes into a pipe, and floods the downstairs kitchen; whereupon Pete the plumber rushes to the scene, but slips and crashes through the French doors. Monica the glasier comes rushing to the rescue to fix the glass, but cuts her finger and bleeds all over the floor, meaning Charlie has to come and replace the living room carpet, where in fitting it, the hammer flies out of his hand and cracks the floor tiles by the woodburner, and so on.

This is what politicians do to our economy. And all the time, the public are just egging on these mess creators to interfere with different messes. Even when they are not making a big mess, they habitually make small messes and pass them off as tidying up jobs. The example hitting the headlines this week is that in trying to gain popularity by promising borrowers billions of pounds to help them though the mortgage crisis, the opposition parties are merely giving one group of people a helping hand at the expense of other groups. If you fund the mortgage help by increasing the money supply, you make the problem bigger, not smaller. And if you fund it through taxing banks, the increased costs will be passed on to other customers of the bank. 

On the other hand, subsidising the mortgage would have a similar kind of distortionary effect, whereby demand for mortgages increases, and with not enough supply to keep up with demand, the price of property would go up even more. This meddling creates the law of unintended consequence of targeted benefits for one group at the expense of others, to which politicians are either oblivious or indifferent. It’s a kind of pass the explosive parcel fallacy.

And then we get the ingenious idea for rival meddling from Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves:

1. Borrowers will be able to switch to interest-only

2. Borrowers will be able to increase mortgage length

3. Borrowers can undo No.s 1&2

4. Six months before lender can start a repossession

5. FCA to advise credit ratings should be unaffected

I’ve always thought of Reeves as being quite dim, but this policy would take us beyond the dim into the downright ethically and economically hazardous. The first four are further examples of the pass the explosive parcel fallacy I mentioned, which is a sub-group of the law of unintended consequences. But number 5 is a completely ignoble form of meddling that distorts the picture beyond what anyone should hope or expect. Were the FCA to start advising under a political mandate that credit ratings should be unaffected by mortgage switches, it would have a terrible effect on the utility of credit ratings, and on mortgage rates more widely. 

Under ordinary circumstances, transparency is important, because if prospective lenders can gauge risks accurately from credit agencies, the lending and the perceived risk of defaulting are fairly well tailored for the transaction. But, if under Labour’s guidance, lenders can no longer trust credit ratings in the same way, they will have to be more risk averse with their loans – which means many prospective borrowers will be unable to get loans for mortgages, and many others will get loans but be forced to pay even higher interest rates.

All these political bright ideas I mentioned above are just the latest in a line of bad interferences designed to clean up the mess created from previous bad interferences, and so it goes on.

Dodgy Belief Bandits: The Hawks, Pigeons and Sparrows

 

There are lots of mistaken belief systems that depart from the facts and logic of their counterpart. The cure to the disease is always the medicine that corrects the damaging symptoms. The cure for atheism and false religion is Christianity; the cure for socialism is good economics; the cure for young earth creationism is biological evolution and sound theology; the cure for astrology is astronomy, and so forth.

But it's clear that people afflicted by dodgy belief systems are not particularly keen to take their medicine. Instead, they often take an ironically absurd view that the medicine they are being offered is really a poison. Having quite a bit of exposure over the years to proponents of these dodgy belief systems, I've observed that the members of these groups largely fall into one of three categories: what I've defined as Hawks, Pigeons and Sparrows.

Hawks
The Hawks are the ones most heavily influencing the perversion of the truth; they are usually public figures who use the dodgy belief systems to establish their own careers, publish their own material, increase their own following, and widely influence the Pigeons and the Sparrows with their distorted views of the world. Most of the untruths and fabrications that make up these dodgy belief systems start with the Hawks - they have a set of carefully rehearsed arguments and statements - and their influence trickles down into the minds of the Pigeons and Sparrows. The Hawks make up the smallest group.

Pigeons
The Pigeons are not as influential or as damaging as the Hawks, but they establish their own perverted influences on the basis of what the Hawks are doing. They forage around for the scraps, and use the influences of the Hawks to share their interpretations of the bad beliefs wherever they can. Whereas the Hawks are likely to be in mainstream newspapers, on TV, and creating their own institutions based on the bad beliefs, Pigeons are more like to be blogging, posting on social media and making comments in debating groups and on other people's pages. The Pigeons make up the middle sized group - they are much larger in number than the Hawks, but much smaller in number than the Sparrows.

Sparrows
The Sparrows are the group that play a much more passive role in the proceedings. They have been influenced by the Hawks and Pigeons, and they believe the same misinformed things that the Hawks and Pigeons believe, but more as background noise, in a much more innocent fashion. If you asked the Sparrows to explain why they believe what they do, their answers would be circumspect, non-engaging and deferential - usually just a brief justification of their naked assumptions, while being unable to formulate proper justifications. The Sparrows are the main victims of the Hawks and the Pigeons - they do not know any better, but they blindly trust their influences, while not being wide influencers themselves. The Sparrows make up the largest group.

You can use the basic algorithm of thinking of an individual and one of their primary dodgy beliefs, and it will usually be fairly obvious whether they are more like a Hawk, a Pigeon or a Sparrow. Consider evolution-denying creationists who hold the absurd belief that the earth is only a few thousand years old. The Hawks are people like Ken Ham (Answers In Genesis), Grady McMurtry (Creation Worldview Ministries), John Mackay (Creation Research) and Kent Hovind (Creation Science Evangelism) - the intellectual fraudsters who make a living and a career out of deceiving people, and whose false teachings gain them a significant following.  

The Pigeons are those doing the most to propagate the falsehoods of the Hawk charlatans - you'll find them scattered throughout churches, writing and commentating online, telling fellow Christians how erroneous and compromising it would be to accept evolution, and being the main champions of the Hawks. The Sparrows are far more innocuous in terms of the pernicious influence of evolution denial - they are not out to cause trouble, but they are, in a sense, the biggest victims of evolution-denying creationism, as they are more numerous, and have remained uncritical enough to have swallowed the fabrications whole.

The falsehoods of those dodgy belief systems are usually equally false, whether they are spouted by Hawks, Pigeons or Sparrows - but the folk who believe in them are not all of the same influence or persuasion.

 

Finding Light In Bereavement

First published today on Network Norfolk:

My father passed away a few weeks ago, and I have been reflecting on his life, his pain, and his death, in the hope of writing something meaningful and encouraging. The final chapter of my father's life saw him suffer with dementia - nature's nasty double cross, when your mind and body slowly turn from being a friend to being a foe. Throughout the pain and grief that accompanies dementia, God has spoken to me in profound ways that I'm still in the process of trying to unpack.

In the last year of his life, in particular, I've had to watch my father suffer in ways that penetrate my heart and soul beyond mere words. Even as a Christian, it is difficult to think of a gradual process in life that's more upsetting and demoralising - the slow decline of a loved one into a perpetual state of unsettled and confused torment.

But throughout the dark period, I've seen so much light, and so much to be amazed at, as God's love and comfort has been bestowed with such abundance throughout. Given the way that God has shown His presence throughout this ordeal, it gives me an even more acute awareness of how amazing He is, and what an astonishing thing it is that He cares about every part of our life, and craves an even closer relationship with each of us.

When I delivered the eulogy at my father's funeral, I also paid tribute to my dear mum, who did an absolutely incredible job looking after dad for so many years during his decline, right until the end. It's one of the most remarkable things a human can do for a loved one - to effectively forsake the majority of their own life for years, so that their loved one can be cared for, and looked after with the full protection of their own dignity, as they start to become more and more vulnerable. Giving up our life with sacrificial love is Christ-like in nature - it reflects what our Lord did for us on the cross, and it's a continuous act that has the power to speak to us through the love and devotion of our fellow humans.

Dad suffered so much with his decline in health - and while I always felt God's closeness throughout, I began to discover how my father's affliction and the love that surrounded him brought about a testimony that will continue to live on. In a way that's easier to feel than to articulate, if dad was destined to pay the price of his decline, there a sense in which the Lord has used this unwilful sacrifice to illuminate the goodness, kindness, and love of Jesus through all the good that came out of its surroundings.

My father didn't choose to spend his final years in so much torment and confusion - but in a profound way, his involuntary suffering helped create the conditions under which the power of Divine love could be exhibited through the human love and devotion that surrounded his hardship. My father knew the Lord - and now that he's at peace with Him, I think he'll have comfort in the knowledge that God can continue to use his suffering as a testimony and a force for good in the world, as his remaining loved ones testify in spoken eulogies, and reflections in articles like this, about how we have felt God's love so profoundly during this time of pain, grief, and loss, and how God's presence has been so strong throughout.

When you are that close to the end of life with dementia, you don't know or remember much - but I believe you still sense the power of love from those with you who love you - especially the love of Christ through the Holy Spirit inside. God's love is always there, of course, it's just often felt more acutely during pain and anguish. There's a piece of spiritual wisdom from Carl Jung, who says "What you most want to be found will be found where you least want to look". That's such a deep thing to contemplate - it's one of the reasons why, I think, when we confront suffering with love, we start to see just how infinitely powerful a force love is.

The light has always been more powerful than the darkness - and it's at the darkest part where the light is brightest, and where we feel close to God, and sense our reliance upon Him, in ways we otherwise might not.

Writer's Update: The Next Season

One of the ways I define genius is that the average, good and great producers of their craft do what others might be able to do with similar time, effort and creativity - whereas the genius produces craft that nearly all others would never produce with similar time, effort and creativity. Although, ultimately, I think expressions of genius are really the times when we tap into the qualities of the Divine and express it in ways other cannot. Genius finds its provenance in the external force rather than the internal quality. Hold that thought for a moment, and I’ll return to it.

Regarding my own writing journey, I’ve reached the stage now where I’m about to send samples of my work to agents/publishers. The road to finding success, if it happens at all, is likely to take months, and probably years - so in the meantime, I’ll try to be a force for good in the world with my writing and videos, and hope to enhance my profile along the way.

So, back to the first point about genius, and selling that point in relation to my own works. I’ve written a book about God’s genius called The Genius of the Invisible God, where the ideas came via a combination of time, effort and creativity and Divine revelation. I’m convinced that that is its most alluring property in relation to its uniqueness to me as the author – that is, I’m not sure anyone else would have ever come up with it. In other words, if you take my book on economics, or my book on morality – while they are unique, and while I’m pleased with the final versions, I think they are books that someone of a similar mindset could similarly produce, if they studied economics and philosophy to the level required, and applied similar time, effort and creativity to the creation.

But I have a feeling that that’s not true of The Genius of the Invisible God. Because it came from revelation, and because of the cognitive resources expending from the long journey of reasoning and conception, coupled with unique personal experience, I don’t think anyone else would ever come up what’s in this book. And that’s the sort of proposition that should hopefully be attractive to a prospective publisher and is probably my best chance of making a success of it. 

Does The Public Sector Understand Wages?

This was first published on the Adam Smith Institute:

UK workers have been going on strike. But how do the teachers, nurses, and other public sector workers on strike know how much they should be paid? I can help steer them in the right direction with reference to the price system. Let me explain.

Think about your own job - how do you know if you're underpaid, overpaid, or paid just about right? If you're in the private sector, there's a good chance that your pay is just about right, because there is nothing more efficient than the price system for determining the right levels of pay.

I'll oversimplify the following example slightly for the purposes of illustration. Suppose we have Jack, who is overpaid in his job, and Fred, who is paid about right. Imagine the country has lots of job vacancies at the right labour rates. If Jack's wages are cut to the marginal rate, then he'll be unhappy because he's no longer overpaid. If Fred's wages are cut, then he'll now be underpaid, and he can move to a job in which he will be paid his marginal rate.

Cutting Jack's pay was a good move for his employer, but cutting Fred's pay was a bad move for his. Why? Because Fred's employer has been outbid by a more competitive employer paying the marginal rate. Fred's ability to find another job at the rate he was on is pretty much all the evidence you need that he was not overpaid. But Jack's grievance at his pay cut stems largely from the fact that he'd find it difficult to get another job at the same rate, which is pretty much all the evidence you need that he was overpaid.

Remember, in economics, the price system for labour in terms of the employee also has a logical standard - the worker ought to be paid the amount that makes their job more desirable than the next best alternative. That's why there is competition for employers to pay rates that will attract the best employees.

I don't know what the exact rates of pay should be for doctors, nurses, paramedics or teachers, but I can tell what we should want to see if we want those industries to thrive. We want to see the wages set to enable the vacancies filled, and to the level that public sector workers are invested in their careers, and satisfied in their work, but not so satisfied that they are earning over their marginal rate. In economic terms, we want them to prefer their job to the next best alternative, and we want their pay to reflect those preferences in accordance with the price system.

The situation should reflect the following: given a pool of identical employees, some of whom are producing X a month in the private sector, and others who are producing X + Y a month in the public sector (and vice-versa), you'd want to move the marginal worker to the sector closest to X (where X is the correct marginal rate) - and this should extend in both sectors in all industries until the two productivities reach equilibrium. At which point, we have an efficient allocation, whereby the output of the doctors, nurses, paramedics or teachers would be the same as it would be in a private sector job.

There's another reason why it's important for public sector employers to pay their employees something approximating the market rates, and not underpay or overpay them. We want a society in which everyone is incentivised to contribute most, in accordance with their talents and skills - and, again, there is nothing as efficient as the price system for determining who is doing what. Every highly skilled and talented individual who is hired in one sector is no longer available in the other.

If workers are overpaid in one sector at the expense of the other sector, then labour rates are not optimally set in a way that draws the right employees into the right jobs and careers. We don't want the brightest neurosurgeons incentivised to work in IT, we don't want the brightest data scientists in public sector middle management jobs, and we don't want our top physicists tempted to work in the retail industry. For that reason alone, as much as we don't want our public sector workers to be underpaid, we don't want them to be overpaid either.

As we've said, the best way to determine the right level of pay is the price system; and the best way to determine if the public sector pay levels are right is to ensure that they as closely matched to the equivalent roles in the private sector as possible. The trouble is, in most cases, it is difficult to know which jobs in the private sector are comparable or equivalent to jobs in the public sector - there are too many factors to make an easy comparison, which makes the desires and the negotiations somewhat intractable.

The Fundamental Political Problem

 

It hasn’t slipped my notice, and it shouldn’t slip yours either, that by and large, the services in this country that have been consistently performing the worst in recent times have been the services politicians have been attempting to heavily manage. Think about it; the most financially strained, under-performing, crisis-laden services are the health services, social care, education, and the parts of the economy that politicians attempt to govern. Don’t get me wrong, our health workers, social workers, teachers, etc are doing an amazing job under hugely challenging conditions – this is not their fault – but the industries in which they serve, and in which they are understandably so unhappy, strained and unsettled, are the ones that are most incompetently managed and poorly planned by our political overseers.

Despite the clear warning signs of more deeply rooted issues with this model, remarkably, the majority of the population seem to think that these issues can only be resolved by having even more government involvement in the matters, or more public money thrown at the problems, or that things wouldn’t be quite so severe if only the other party was in charge. This kind of wishful pleading and sub-standard party political group-think has been going on for decades, and it is perpetuating a narrative that has the dual effect of misleading the public further and further, and increasing the damage to society as it does so. I will explain both.

The first thing you should always remember is that humans are primarily selfish – by which I mean that they are primed to put their own interests first, and those of their family and strong tie connections, and think and act in a relatively short-term manner. There’s nothing outrageous or shocking about that – humans have limited capacity (time, energy, resources), so it makes sense that they do this. Just as when you’re on a flight that comes into difficulty, the wisdom of “putting on your own oxygen mask first before helping others” is sensible advice (you need oxygen yourself to enable you to help others, even your own children) – similarly, if you are going to have a widely positive impact on others, you need to get your own house in order first.

The kind of pattern of behaviour I’m describing generally works well in the free market too, where pursuing your own family interests first, also creates wealth and value for others too, in a broad competitive and cooperative society. Jack the furniture maker, Jill the florist, Susie the accountant and Dave the greengrocer all make a living by selling their goods and services, but they are of benefit to their consumers too (these are called consumer and producer surpluses). The key to all the value being created here is that, in a world consisting of billions of complex trade-offs, all the agents of participation know their own wants, needs, skills and individual preferences better than anyone else, so are (usually) optimally equipped to make those decisions.

The problem is, this kind of model does not translate very well into the political sphere. Humans being primed to put their own interests first works a lot better in a market where the Smithian ‘invisible hand’ is at work, than in politics. It doesn’t work brilliantly in the market every time, and it doesn’t work badly in politics every time – but, by and large, human selfishness is a bigger problem in politics than it is in the market. Here’s why. Even if you are selfish, greedy and profit-seeking in the market, you can’t make a living unless you are competent enough to provide goods or services that others want and are willing to pay for. But selfish politicians don’t have the same incentives to be as careful with their money, their actions or their policies as the everyday individual, because politicians rarely feel the full effects of their actions, and almost never pay the price of their bad policies. The only way they pay the price is by being voted out at the next election, but that simply means that those self-interests are most energised in favour of short-term decision-making and narrow perspectives that usually benefit a small minority at the expense of everyone else.

And it’s becoming increasingly difficult for society to hold politicians accountable for acting in such selfish narrow interests, not just because humans generally are self-interested and lack the incentive to bring about changes, but because the whole political charade has been partially created by the volitional endorsement of its model by the electorate. In other words, there is a co-dependency by the governors and the governed that acts as a tacit advocation of the human selfishness problem on which the political sphere operates - and this consists of numerous self-centred, short-termist decisions that range from being annoying and marginally costly, to being absolutely dreadful for society.

For example, the main reasons that the health services, social care and education are in such a mess is because politicians aren’t able to make decisions that factor in the range of complexities required for the services to be optimal. As a consequence, they mismanage the finances, and they continually try to solve problems with short term perspectives, meaning that they never keep up with the changing landscape. It’s not entirely their fault; we’ve become a society that demands that politicians solve problems they are ill-equipped and unmotivated to solve properly, so everyone has to keep up the facade – which is why we get the aforementioned futile cycle of the majority thinking that these issues can only be resolved by having more government involved in the matters, or more public money thrown at the problems, or that things wouldn’t be quite so severe if only the other party was in charge. This has been failing for so long, it is mystifying to me why so few people have got wise to this debacle.

To make matters even worse, the selfish, short termism of politicians is even more damaging when it comes to the influence they have on the economy. Again, many people are struggling with the cost of living, yet they seem to be perpetually convinced that if only the failing model grew even bigger, or another party took over to govern it, things would be better. Let’s take the confusion about inflation, prices and public spending as a good example of a long-standing and snowballing catastrophe.

I have a couple of blogs in the Economics sidebar that go into inflation more deeply, but let’s talk about inflation in relation to price perspective. Consider tomatoes. The media has reported this week that there is a shortage of tomatoes. Suppose for simplicity, tomatoes generally cost £2 per kilo. When a supply shock occurs, with no change in demand, supermarkets raise their price to £2.50 a kilo. This is generally a good thing, because nothing has changed in the UK’s money supply, and with the increased price, those who value tomatoes at less than their new retail price won’t buy them. Unfortunately, most politicians and social media commentators have joined the general public in confusing inflation with price increases. Higher value tomatoes caused by a supply shock or a natural increase in demand is a price increase, not inflation; inflation is largely connected to an increase in the money supply. If there was no change in the supply of tomatoes, but the government decided to increase the money supply to pay for a subsidy so that every citizen in the UK could have a kilogram of tomatoes every week, then the price of tomatoes would go up because people now have more money to buy tomatoes. When the money supply is increased, each pound you own becomes less valuable, because there are more of them in circulation.

Returning to self-serving politicians, part of their short-termism is in vastly increasing the money supply to pay for things that will help them stay in power. But when politicians increase the money supply and the credit supply, purchasing power goes all out of whack with the market’s supply and demand signals, hurting most of the citizens in the country (this is also mostly why house prices have continued to rise faster than real wages). In other words, the government and the banks usually benefit from an inflated money and credit supply, but most other people feel the costs – they just don’t often realise why they are feeling the costs.

All this new money hasn’t created significantly more value or any more material resources, which means there is more of it competing for the same resources, which means that, combined with higher taxes to pay for it, things like food, fuel, energy, etc cost more for the consumer like you and me. It is literally the case that short-termist governments are increasing the money supply to favour their own self-interested priorities first, and in doing so, they are diminishing the wealth and purchasing power of almost everyone else. It is also literally the case that this has been going on for decades, and that the public blithely encourages their own wealth diminution with consistent regularity by continuing to vote for this kind of governance.

Furthermore, such a system of governance has continually been manipulated by special interest lobbyist groups, who bid for first dibs on the extra money or credit that has been generated. The politicians are often happy to support these projects regardless of whether they provide value, whether they allocate resources efficiently and whether they make the nation poorer overall, because a) they know there will be little resistance from a general public that doesn’t really notice how these activities are harming them, and b) they know they can make the very same public pay for it through increased taxation, and burden future generations with much of the debt. At the time of writing, this official national debt (what the state owes to private enterprise, including banks) is about £2,800,459,700,000 (it’s even more than that, really, if you factor in other unmentioned liabilities – but let’s keep it simple), and is growing at the rate of about £5,170 per second.

The above is the kind of consideration you should be having when being forced to confront the daily realities of cost-of-living crises, rising prices, inflation, strained public services and a devalued pound sterling. Covid has only exacerbated the problems, of course – but this cycle of problematic and clumsy economic mismanagement has going on for a long time – and that is largely because of the way that the malaware of human self-interest and short-termism has become so infectious in our politics, and because the anti-viral software of the general public is so badly in need of an upgrade.

Reality Check: There Are Many More Ways To Make The World Worse Than Better

The best way to change the world for the better is to set small but realistic goals. Unfortunately, many people, especially young people, are being encouraged to do the opposite, making them preoccupied with large, unrealistic goals. Many of our young people are huge idealists, believing they can make the world significantly better with their political and social causes. When they grow older, most will come to realise that the world doesn't often improve in this way, as virtually all improvements, even the biggest ones, are small, gradual and incremental. We'll return to this shortly.

To make improvements, we need to think, and apply those thoughts to life - and to do so, we need a coherent mental process of sifting and selecting to build a corpus of views and beliefs we think are correct and beneficial to humanity. Although it's not visible to the naked eye, the brain is undertaking these computations with great frequency in quick execution time - sifting and selecting to expunge the mind of all incorrect data - a bit like how an anti-virus scan on your pc sifts and selects the data that's potentially corrupt (whether the mind embraces truth and facts is an altogether more complex matter that we don't have time to explore here).

For simplicity, let's divide the thought system into 3 categories: correct views, agnostic views and incorrect views:

1) I believe x is correct, and x does happen to be correct. (Correct)

2) I am unsure whether x is correct because I have kernels of ideas but don't know enough to be wholly confident. (Agnostic)

3) I believe x is correct, but x does not happen to be correct. (Incorrect)

Every view or belief you have falls broadly in one of those three categories. These also fall under a scale of varying complexity. Take the proposition of exertions of mutually attractive forces as examples. I would be a category 1 on the proposition that macroscopic objects in the universe exert a mutually attractive force proportionally to their masses, and that therefore force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. I would also be a category 1 on the proposition that with a telescope, the size of the smallest object it can see at any given distance is inversely proportional to the diameter of the telescope lens. These are scientific facts about which we should all be category 1.

But on the proposition 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 - well, I am more of a soft agnostic. That doesn't mean it does not hold for a multitude of cases, just that if examples came out of the epistemological woodwork to undermine the consistency of the rule, I would be all set to revise the strength of my conviction.

This is the sifting and selecting heuristic we use, as best as possible, to guard against being wrong. The fact that many people have faulty cognitive software in this process is not down to the hardware (not usually anyway) - it is usually down to bad learned behaviour. This is why falsehood and being wrong has a negative effect on a person's well-being - and why there is collateral damage on the mind's emotional well-being when it is in a state of cognitive dissonance.

I think we should always pay careful attention to laws of nature that are also rules that govern human beings. One such example is this: it is a lot easier to fail than to succeed. It is a lot easier to make a cacophony of discordant noise on a piano than it is to play a tune; it is a lot easier to drop an egg on the floor than it is to clean it up; it is a lot easier to write a rubbish play than it is to write a masterpiece. But why? The main reason is to do with numbers: there are astronomically more ways to do something badly than do something well; there are astronomically more ways to make a mess to be clean; and there are astronomically more ways to write a load of rubbish than there are to write high quality plays.

We shouldn't be surprised: this law runs through the heart of evolutionary biology. Think of genetic mutations - that is, the genetic material that is duplicated, transposed, deleted, and inserted. The measure of success of any mutation is related to the differential probability of reproductive success that it confers on the mutated offspring. New information comes from the random mutations that take place in the reproductive process of every single offspring. Every offspring gets the DNA from the parents, with a small number of mutations. If an organism gets to reproduce, it will pass on those differences along with the additional mutations that take place in the next generation. So the rule of survival is that mutation creates variation, and selection preserves helpful mutations. Those mutations, once preserved in this manner, propagate and their novel genes are distributed throughout the population. New mutations arise, selection favours or disfavours these mutations, and the complexity builds. Most evolutionary changes are the result of gene duplication and subsequent mutation.

Now here's the kicker: most mutational effects are either neutral or negative - relatively few are beneficial. Just as with the above examples we touched upon, the reason most mutational effects are not beneficial is because there are astronomically more ways to be non-beneficial than to be beneficial. It is this principle to which people who want to make a significant impact on the world should pay closest attention. Give a teenager a set of tools and a dismantled car engine, and he'll soon discover that there are many more ways that he can make a mess of assembling it than there are ways he can assemble it correctly. Compared to a global society and its economies, a car engine is very simple. Imagine, therefore, how many ways there are to make a society worse compared with the number of ways there are to make it better.

It's here that we return to the wisdom that the best way to change the world for the better is to set small but realistic goals. Let me offer an illustration. Imagine an island of 100 people trying to create a better society. The inhabitants who prioritise improving themselves, by seeking the truth, learning facts, embracing goodness, utilising their talents and skills and striving for personal progress are much more likely to make the island a better place than the inhabitants who disregard all that and go all out to change the island with an abstract collectivist agenda.

Another reason why there are so many more ways to get things wrong than right is because the world is highly complex, and because it is not easy to manage highly complex things efficiently from on high. This is because humans are adaptive systems that operate in a world that thrives on collective, bottom-up contributions, based on local knowledge and personal incentives tailored to individual goals. To understand why this is so, just consider what you had for lunch today. I had paella, which consisted of rice, chicken, prawns, chorizo, peas, peppers, saffron, and paprika. To gather all the ingredients of that paella, and get it onto my plate, required the interactions of millions of people - each with unique tastes, skills and knowledge - and innumerable local decisions that are based on the decisions of others, all of which dictate how much that paella costs to buy, and how much of it needs to be produced.

Extend that to every person in the world and the billions of local decisions and tens of billions of goods and services that are supplied, and you can see it is an object of staggering complexity that works better than anything else that has ever existed. The economy is the ultimate success in spontaneous order. The corollary of this is just as telling. Because value is created every time there is a single mutually beneficial transaction between buyer and seller, the aggregation of the value created in a global economy and the exponential progression that occurs the more markets become interconnected is built on those tens of billions of local transactions that occur every day on the planet.

I hope that paints a picture of why there are so many ways to make the world worse than better - and why, if you want to make the world better, far and away the best way to do it is to get your own house in order, and encourage everyone you know to do the same. Everyone doing their best to seek the truth, work hard, improve themselves, apply their skills, do good, and use resources efficiently is the best way to reduce the impact of the rule that there are so many ways to make the world worse than better. Conversely, people who have big visions but uncultivated minds are going to heighten the effect of the rule, and make a mess far more than they ever clean up one.

On The Quality, Cultivation & Sustenance of Friendship

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
E. M. Forster 

I've been thinking a lot about friendship recently, especially close friendship. Close friendship is one of the most wonderful of earthly qualities – alongside romantic love and familial bonds, it is the third part of the trinity of essential inter-relational human connections. A great friend acts like a mirror into our soul - through them our world becomes even more interesting and rewarding, and we can see more clearly inside ourselves and become better than we would have been without them. I'd say there are six key elements to a great friendship; you need mutual effort, you need trust, you need honesty, you need dependability, you need solicitude and you need truth.

Mutual effort: You both need to make the effort to sustain the friendship at a high level - you have to take an interest in each other, and that interest has to be two ways.

Trust: You must be able to trust each other; with your secrets and your lives if necessary.

Honesty: You should know each other deeply, openly and sincerely enough to be yourself, and not be unfairly judged.

Dependability: You need to be there for each other through thick and thin, be reliable, and be willing to take the weight of your friend when you are needed.

Solicitude: Like above, you should both care deeply about each other, where putting your friend’s needs first (when appropriate) doesn’t feel like a cost.

Truth: You need your combined realities to be anchored in truth, so you can be the truest version of yourselves with each other, otherwise the rest of the qualities remain filtered and suppressed.

It’s great to have lots of friends in a wide and diverse circle, but I don’t think we need dozens of very close friends – around five is sufficient. It’s difficult to feed and sustain any more than about five or six high quality, close affinity friendships. In fact, to nourish the most important and mutually beneficial friendships, you have to guard against expending too many emotional and intellectual resources on friendships that are only superficially of a good quality, or on friendships that have (often for good reason) undergone a natural declension over time. Three things can expose a friendship as being shallower than you envisaged:

1} When you wake up one day and it dawns on you that the friendship is largely being sustained by your efforts (to make contact, to take an interest, to initiate social contact, you’re the only listener in a one-way conversation, etc)

2} When something difficult happens in your life, and all your fair-weather friends disappear, or fail to do the right thing in standing up with you against suffering, an injustice or in opposition to poor treatment.

3} When certain friendships exist not in a high quality 121 capacity, but merely as part of a larger social circle. Sometimes you just realise about a person that there is an inverse correlation between the quality of friendship between you and x, and the number of other friends in the circle that contains you and x. 

It’s absolutely essential that close friendships must be two-way – you must give your all in caring about each other, and being there for each other. But you must be capable enough to not burden a friend with an over-abundance of issues – especially issues it behoves you to address more competently yourself. A highly unsymmetrical friendship is burdensome for the person carrying the bigger weight. You ought to find you're giving about as much as you're receiving. That’s why the relationship between a psychologist and patient is quite unlike friendship – it can never satisfy the deepest needs for both parties, because therein lies the lack of reciprocity.

A friend who chooses you for the sake of utility is dodgy - which can be a tricky assessment to make, because we all have utility in friendships. Therefore, I suggest a good way to measure a healthy level of utility is to determine to what extent your friend is interested in you, in the core essence of you. Those that are, you’ll know – you’ll really know. Those who are with you only for the superficial rewards can very easily be without you when the rewards dry up, or when they find bigger rewards elsewhere. High quality friends don’t do this, because from the start they are in it for more than rewards.

It's interesting too how, for most things we achieve in life, we require patient searching and probing – but in the best friendships, the strong depth of connection is largely unsought. We don’t have to artificially over-indulge our exploratory efforts in order for the greatest friendships to blossom - fantastic friends are like two jigsaw pieces that fit neatly into the same puzzle. That is one of the senses in which friendship and love with a beloved differ. And those differences can be subtle, and not as obvious as you think, because in friendship there is also love. If you created a Venn diagram, the intersecting circle that contains the qualities that pertain to both friends and beloveds would take up the majority of the diagram. Friendships don’t have the Eros type of love, but they have philia, pragma and agape.

Another big practical difference between friendship and relationship with a beloved is that relationships are built on continually seeing each other, whereas friendships can stay stronger for longer without regular contact. The qualities of friendship can be magnified in absence in a way that the qualities of love will not be. An absence of your beloved is going to frustrate and starve the organism of oxygen. Given that friendship is absent of Eros, it lacks some of the pleasure-seeking sensations that marriage does, and could be argued to have a virtue that even marital love doesn’t have. However, that thought can be subdued by the notion that within the intimate relationship with your beloved there should exist a depth of friendship unequalled in any other external friendship.

Another strange and unique thing about friendship is that it requires active involvement between both agents to sustain its very existence, in a way that most other relationships or connections do not. You can buy a precious gemstone from a jeweller you’ve never met; you can admire someone famous who is never likely to meet you and know that admiration; you may have a father who knows nothing of your existence; you may even have the deepest unrequited love for someone who has no awareness of such a powerful feeling. But friendship is different – one can’t have a friendship unless both parties are actively involved in building and sustaining the organism.

Finally, an amusing thought on which to end. If you're new to a city, and you're looking to make new friends, you have the following hurdle to negotiate. The best people to be good friends with are likely to be the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people you could get to know. But the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people are likely to be the busiest, most popular and most in-demand people too. The best chance of breaking in is if you happen to be even smarter, wittier, kinder and more generous-hearted than the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people you could get to know.

 

How We Might Move On From Racism

 

I like to spend time listening to people whose opinions differ from my own. During the financial crisis, I went to engage with the protesters who were camped outside banks; I've been to several Black History Month events; and I've even spent a weekend camping with environmentalists. All those experiences have been very useful in trying to understand how these groups think and what their motivations are. I've written a lot about socialism and environmentalism on this blog, but not much on racism, which is what I intend to do here.

The first thing to say about racism is that it is clearly a learned phenomenon. When young children are put together to play, they don't show any signs of racial discrimination. We are not born racist; it is implanted from other humans. What struck me from my conversations with people at the Black History Month events is how preoccupied they were with skin colour and racial wrongs from the past. I’m sure that is even truer of more hostile groups like Black Lives Matter – there is a propensity to see the world through the unhelpful, divisive and counter-progressive lens of group identity and ethno-tribal polarisation. Personally, I tend to live as much in the present as possible, I try to treat everyone as though they are loved and infinitely valuable, and I couldn’t care a jot about the things (like skin colour and ethnicity) that seem to cause so much prejudice. I care about you as a person, and am interested in you as a unique individual – not as a secondary group member to which you may happen to belong.

Now, I’m not saying the past doesn’t matter, and I’m not saying this country has no present day racism to contend with. But it seems clear to me that continually going on about past legacies, and remaining preoccupied with skin colour and so-called racial identity is only perpetuating a stratification that most people have moved on from (and most prejudice that appears racist probably isn’t racist anyway – see my blog here). This point is compounded by the fact that people who are preoccupied with what others have done to people like them in the past are generally preoccupied with what people have done to black people, as though that particular category of racism is the primary one in history. But the reality is, history is replete of all kinds of injustices committed by every kind of skin colour and ethnicity: white on black, black on white, black on black, Asian on black, white on Asian, and so on, dating back thousands of years.

We are living in a time when the anti-racists are behaving a lot like the historical racists, and the anti-fascists are behaving a lot like the historical fascists – and we need to move forward. As Marcus Aurelius said: “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” Suppose a magic switch was flicked, and everyone woke up tomorrow morning with no awareness of past ethnic, racial and religious injustices. Black and white people, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, and so on, would no longer see each other through the prism of past troubles, but simply as different people co-existing alongside one another. I’m not saying that cultural identity and heritage isn’t important. But if we stopped making so much of past racial prejudices and began to refrain from preoccupations with skin colour and group identity, we’d prime ourselves for a future of diminished racial tension.

What about the Lady Susan Hussey and Ngozi Fulani debacle?
I think Lady Hussey's line of questioning could have been better, of course - but the same can be said about Ngozi Fulani's response too, which looked to be opportunist, disingenuous and self-serving. Lady Hussey was stitched up by Fulani, and then subsequently thrown under a bus by the Royals, including her own Godson, Prince William - who, if the media account is accurate, responded ignobly in this. After her 60 years of loyal service, Lady Susan Hussey deserved far better than this - and I think this has reflected very badly on the Royals.

To be fair to Ngozi Fulani, I have sympathy with the fact that it must be difficult to have your nationality questioned when she was born in the UK. And I'm sure it's not always easy to live in a nation in which your skin colour is the minority one. But it would have been very easy for her to have responded to Lady Hussey with more grace and understanding, and not to have capitalised on a poor dialogue in such an egregious way. Not that we should be surprised - from past activity, it looks very much like Ngozi Fulani is a racial grifter, in the same way that Dianne Abbott, Affua Hirsch, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Kerry-Anne Mendoza are racial grifters. To see what I mean by racial grifters, here's a quote from a blog post of mine from 2021:

"It seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us)."

Ngozi Fulani and the aforementioned group are racial grifters in the same way that Owen Jones, Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Loach are poverty grifters; and in the same way that Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot and the numerous wacky environmentalist hysterics (Extinction Rebellion, Just-Stop-Oil, etc) are climate grifters. They make their living and their reputation on the attempted prolongation of the thing to which they claim opposition, seizing every opportunity to cry foul and attribute malice or bigotry where none exists or is intended.

And this leads us full circle to the opening points. Unless social and cultural grifting is shown up for the pernicious creep that it is, we are doomed to keep repeating the taints of the past, from which the vast majority of folk in the UK have moved on.

A Deeper Look At The Recent Census On Religious Belief

According to the headline-grabbing census, there has been a 5.5 million drop in the number of Christians in the UK, equating to a 17% fall in the number of people who identify as Christian. Apparently, it is the first time in a census of England and Wales that fewer than half of the population have described themselves as Christian. Humanists and secularists have been buoyed by this census, celebrating the news that, on the surface, we seem to live in a post-Christian society. But surface-level thinking is often deceptive, because it doesn't delve down into the real depths of the water.

Once we dive in, we'll find several key points being missed. In the first place, census results are only as good as the questions being asked. Belief and faith are complex propositions attached not just superficially to what people say, but to how people act, the values they adhere to, and the obvious deeper spiritual longings that play out alongside those actions. In the second place, for the past 100 years there has been a clearer distinction emerging between the identity of a British person as a cultural Christian and as a practising Christian who accepts Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. This distinction has been more carefully eroded away in recent decades, I'd suggest, where the number of people who call themselves Christian may have decreased as a proportion of the population, but the ones that do call themselves Christian continue to profess an active faith in the Lord Jesus, where the real decline is probably more in the demise of 'cultural Christianity'.

In the third place, despite what people claim to believe in a census, we cannot live in a post-Christian country, because Christ IS the Truth. All claims of post-truth of any kind, Christian or otherwise, are false by matters of degree. That is, people always have and always will act as though Christianity is true - in their underlying values, in their regard for truth over falsehood, for good over evil, for love over hate, for right over wrong, for marriage over divorce, for kindness over meanness, for grace and forgiveness over hostile resentment, for peace over war, the list goes on. Even if they don't consciously ascribe those qualities to a Christian underpinning, the fact is, Christ is the origin and the source of all goodness in the world. 

In one sense, of course, we've never had a Christian country in the world, because no nation has ever faithfully reflected scripture to the level that it could justifiably call itself Christian. But despite that acknowledgement, when it comes to human morals, behaviour, values and decisions, we are always acting out the Christian truths or departing from them, whether we like it and know it, or not. The cause of everything that's wrong in human society finds its origin, somewhere down the line, in not adhering to the values Christ espouses; and the cause of everything that's right in human society finds its origin, somewhere down the line, in adhering to the values Christ espouses. It is profound, but it is true - Christ's truth, love, grace, wisdom, goodness and sovereignty are the metric we use for all our value systems, because their origin is in the Creator of the universe. Irrespective of what the census reveals, we can be a post-Christian country only in what we claim to believe, not in how we structure our life and our acted-out values, because they are Christian. A swimming fish can claim to be dry, but it cannot convince those fish who swim alongside it who know full well they live in the ocean.

Finally, to make the point even clearer, let's return to the nature of asking questions, and see what the census would look like with questions fit for the depth and gravitas of a Christian faith. Consider if everyone in the UK answered the following questions:

1) Do you value truth more than falsehood?

2) Can you imagine a standard of values higher than values you could attain?

3) Do you fail every day to live up to the standards of Jesus?

4) Are you imperfect, and in need of forgiveness for the wrongs you've committed in your life?

5) Is a society that values good over evil, love over hate, right over wrong, marriage over divorce, kindness over meanness, grace and forgiveness over hostile resentment, and peace over war better than one that does not?

6) Would a God who lived as a man on earth, suffered and died for our sins in an act of supreme love and grace, and rose from the dead to give us eternal salvation, be a God with whom it would be good and beneficial to have a relationship?

These are all questions to which the vast majority of the population, thinking clearly, would answer a resounding YES!

Christianity and its concomitant truths and values are always alive and well in the world, because we are all created to know Christ, and we impute onto our lives a framework narrative in which we act as though Christianity is true. We act as though Christianity is true when we do good and bad, because both times we are showing the truth of the gospel - its truths shine a Divine light when we do good, and its truth pervades and nudges with the absence of light when we plunge ourselves into darkness. 

It is a shame that so many people in the UK now claim to have no Christian belief. But the good news is, every unbeliever in the UK is only one visit to church away from discovering Christ in action, or one profound book away from uncovering the gospel, or one influential Christian friend away from having their perspective changed, or one honest prayer away from having their life transformed by Christ.

Understanding Inequality Better, In Three Easy Steps

 

Pretty much all commentary on inequality is misjudged, and it's largely for three reasons; one is to do with overlooking the inevitable dynamic, two is in misunderstanding what should be measured, and three is in overlooking the scale of measurement. Let's take them in turn.

The inevitable dynamic is basically that in a free country, where people have the opportunity to contribute according to their skills, intelligence, industriousness and competence, wealth will be distributed unevenly. When measuring capital, wealth distributions follow a near-inevitable power law, whereby the top 10% percent are going to have a large proportion of the wealth, and the bottom 50% are going to have significantly less, despite substantially outnumbering the top 10%. I have lots of individual blog posts in my 'Inequality' tab that explain why in more detail.

Regarding the misunderstanding of what should be measured, if you only measure capital, then you have a distorted picture of inequality, because you are disregarding all the things already in place that make us more equal. Once you factor in the many goods and services provided by the state - the health service, social services, the state pension and the many public services - they add up to a lot of value that narrows the wealth gap. Because equality, you see, isn't just about capital, it's mostly about consumption. We also have to factor in the knock-on effects of all this economic growth, like having access to the entire world's knowledge, having more leisure time due to technological enhancements, and all the other concomitant benefits associated with human innovation.

Lastly, on top of overlooking the inevitable dynamic, and misunderstanding what should be measured, there is also the overlooking of the scale of measurement. Where you are in particular stages of life says a lot about your capital and assets, but it often creates a distorted view of a nation's inequality. Students are an obvious case in point - when graduating, they start life in debt, but most go on to earn substantial wages, retire with their own property, and across their life timescale go from negative wealth to reasonable wealth. This is also applies to many other workers, who start life on lower wages when they are young, and progress through their careers with higher wealth.

Insipid left-wing articles about inequality never factor in how to properly measure wealth and standards of living, they don't factor in the big picture where most people get better off with age, and they ignore the fact that in any economically free society, an uneven distribution of wealth is an inevitable outcome of a thriving society.

Given the foregoing, my three easy steps to thinking about inequality correctly are as follows:

Step 1 - Be precise in your language, and define ‘inequality’ properly. Are you talking about inequality of capital assets, consumption, or income? Do you mean inequality before the state has taken tax and passed on public sector benefits or after? And are you factoring in the many other social benefits that reduce inequality in other ways, due to increased standards of living?

Summary: Define before you complain.

Step 2 – Be clear on the economic and social dynamic that causes inequality. Skills, intelligence, industriousness and competence are the biggest causes of most kinds of inequality, and they are good things. Good things cause most inequality. Every time you buy a best-selling book, go to a music festival, shop on Amazon, do your shopping at Tesco, renew your Microsoft subscription, etc, you make the world a little more unequal. But you do these things because you are supporting other people’s prodigious skills, intelligence, industriousness and competence.

Summary: Understand how the world works before you complain.

Step 3 – Be aware of the big picture regarding where, why and when people’s individual life circumstances contribute to the distribution curves of the Gini coefficient, and how those contributions change over time.

Summary: Be mindful that (in)equality is dynamical, not static, before you complain.

Finally, some more insight to digest. Suppose Rich Roger has accumulated lots of capital through market transactions. He's done so by providing value to society. But it doesn't end there. Roger's accumulation of capital is going to be two other things; if he spends it, it creates a living for other people; and if he conserves his capital, then in spending less than he is saving he is leaving more goods and services available to everyone else (and at a slightly cheaper price).

Diversity is so often rightly celebrated in society - diversity of looks, talents, age, specialisations, interests, passions, culture, personalities, etc - and diversity in wealth, income and consumption are a fundamental part of, and result of, those other diversities we celebrate. I think we need to get out of the habit of using the loaded term 'income inequality' and simply call it 'diversity of assets', because that's what it really is, and society is all the better for it.

The Most Interesting Monsters Are The Ones In The Head

 

I love movies and TV drama, and I have a fairly broad and eclectic taste. But I’m usually much more interested in the psychology of inner demons than those created enemy artefacts found in sci-fi, disaster and adventure movies. Films where the heroes are battling against external monsters, aliens, dubious supernatural weidos or big dangerous animals are far less appealing to me than films that delve deeply into the characters’ minds and explore the deep challenges and rewards of being human. 

As Charles Darwin expressed so well, 'We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realised that they were inside us.' The monsters inside even the seemingly ordinary men and women usually strike me as far more scary and compelling and thrilling than just about any outside monster Hollywood has tried to create. Even the best films about external dangers, like Jaws, are really about the nature of being human.

Sunday Faith Series: Dawkins' Faulty Belief-O-Meter

In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins produced his popularly received seven point scale – a 1-7 valuation of the strength of belief or disbelief in God. Here it is:

1.Strong Theist: I am 100% sure that there is a God

2.De-facto Theist: I cannot know for certain but I strongly believe in God and I live my life on the assumption that he is there.

3.Weak Theist: I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.

4.Pure Agnostic: I don’t know about God’s existence or non-existence, so am undecided.

5.Weak Atheist: I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.

6.De-facto Atheist: I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable and I live my life under the assumption that he is not there.

7.Strong Atheist: I am 100% sure that there is no God.

In stating where on the scale he sits, Dawkins says “I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7. I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” In other words, Dawkins is fairly unequivocally an atheist with not much room for change. 

Alas, despite its popularity, Dawkins' 1-7 scale is so philosophically naïve it is all-but meaningless as an exercise. The main thing wrong with it is that as an indicator of strength of belief the model is entirely empty, because the strength of belief is inextricably linked to the quality of mental acuity put into that belief. In other words, anyone can tell you where his strength of belief sits on a made up scale of 1-7, but it is only worth taking seriously if he has a competent understanding of the subject and a good philosophical brain with which to reason.

Suppose someone calls themselves a 6 on Dawkins' scale, and when you ask them why they don't believe in God, they tell you that it's because they once asked Him to reveal Himself by writing 'God' in the sky with stars, and because He didn't, then that is grounds to not believe in Him. Obviously a relatively smart mind would simply object that that's a terrible reason to not believe God exists - in which case, calling your self a 6 on the scale means absolutely nothing to anyone with half a brain.

Theology and philosophy and probability theory are broad and complex subjects, and unless you are competent at all three, any high rating you give yourself on the atheistic part of the Dawkins scale is like calling yourself an excellent literary writer just because you happen to know a lot of words in the dictionary. Dawkins' attempt to construct a scalar model of belief and treat it as a unique metric for philosophical returns is about as narrow-minded and parochial as it gets. What the Dawkins model does is treat people as though they all see religious belief in the same way and with the same ability, and it treats the ‘God’ concept as though it is homogenous in thought structure, when it’s about the least homogenous concept around.

And if it still isn't clear why, then to show the absurdity of making a faux homogenous model, let me alter the concept to something Dawkins will understand; let’s replace the word ‘God’ with ‘evolution’, and ask a bunch of people in the Bible-belt in America where they stand on the 1-7 scale. If the polls are anything to go by, no doubt many fundies in America will say they are a 6 to 7 when it comes to evolution. That is to say, they are as sceptical about the fact of evolution as Richard Dawkins is about God. What do you think Richard Dawkins would say to them when they told him that they were a 6 or 7 when it comes to evolution? He would make the same criticism of them that I have made of him. He’d say with full justification that their comprehension of evolution is so bereft that their gradation is rendered inadequate by such a defective and inept understanding of the object of study. 

When the signs are reversed, that is precisely what is wrong with Dawkins’ own gradation. And by the way, it does not matter that evolution is amenable to scientific study and God is not, because we are only talking about how well the subjects are understood, not the empirical tractability or the final conclusions. Dawkins states that he thinks God does not exist - but his strawman caricatures are so clumsy that most Christians do not believe in the god (small g) that Dawkins denies. This is the principal point of this message, one which makes a good rule of thumb for future reference with another Knight-ism I like to employ;

The God one accepts or denies is only likely to be as intellectually tenable as the intellectual tenability of the person holding those ideas. 
JK