Pavlos's Thoughts

I don’t believe this idea that a firm exists to maximize shareholder returns. If the entire economy was structured on that principle, the world would be dominated by exploitative, rent-seeking organizations even more than it is.

The reason for a firm to exist, primarily and sufficiently, is to produce goods and services that are needed or desirable in the world. There are several ways of judging and directing the firm according to this principle.

• The market is a very good indicator of what the world needs or wants, especially when it comes to the detailed and diverse wishes of individuals. It’s not sufficient, and certainly not right by definition, because the market is prone to manipulation, irrationality, and social injustice making the difference between true wishes and buying power.
• Critical opinion, commentary, or goodwill towards a firm and its activities. It’s no accident that quality consumer goods firms are held in higher regard than most banks.
• An objective analysis of the firm’s product and activities with respect to life, well-being, human fulfillment, and the environment.
• Policy. Companies need to be comissioned to create large-scale infrastructure where the market would yield lower-investment, higher use cost solutions

A second reason for a firm to exist is to provide comfortable and fulfilling employment to the people directly involved in the firm. Balance is the measure here. The firm is not a vehicle to get rich, nor is crushing, subsistence-level employment a goal.

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We in the west tend to think that myth is a naive attempt to understand nature. That’s untrue and not sufficiently generous to those who came before us. Myth is not a failed theory of the universe; it’s a brilliantly successful technology for changing it.

What is the world? It is of course the stars, the Earth, the weather, life, and all the things that are out there. But we do not perceive these things directly, nor do they affect us. What affects us comes through our senses, and the way we perceive is as much a product of our embodied senses and our mind as it is a representation of the true disposition of things. Our perceptions are shaped by the ideas we already hold.

As soon as our ancestral apes became intelligent enough to affect the world, seeking to make it more hospitable to their vulnerable existence, two paths were open. They could make tools, draw predictions, and try to alter the physical world immediately around them, or they could alter their own minds so that their experience would be less harsh, more hopeful, more meaningful, fanciful and interesting, and even less bound to the actual sensations of cold and hunger that the body sometimes offered. The ability to alter the human experience of the world through the communication of ideas is myth.

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There’s around six things that motivate us through life.

Pleasure
We seek physical pleasure. Sex, food, music and dance, or anything that gives a bodilly sense of intense pleasure. We’re wired for it in obvious and direct ways. What’s remarkable about pleasure is marginalized it is in our society. We build the world around us but we don’t build it for pleasure. In your city you might find pleasure in a brothel or a spa, or in a nightclub that’s devoted to adult pleasure. These are seen as indulgences, at best. You might find some dilute, socially acceptable pleasure in a great restaurant, in music, or at the gym.

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What is a person? What are you?

Mostly we don’t exist. The self, the thing that we experience as such, is one of many mental constructs, and not a particularly important one.

What each of us is is a collection of active ideas. Memes is the trendy word. The mind is only a vehicle and an environment for them. If we want to undertand human actions and work effectively with each other, or take moral decisions, the conscious mind or the self aren’t very useful theories. The garden of ideas is the theory that works.

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I’m worried about the future. Not mine, since I’m almost 40 and have a kid so it’s pointless and selfish to worry about my future, but the near future of humanity. I feel the world will see some challenging decades ahead. The three big risks are:

• The oil running out. As we run out of fossil fuels, we’ll see an “oil endgame” played out across the world. The seizure of Iraq by the US over the past two decades, as well as ongoing control over the Middle Eastern oil reserves, are mid-game steps along the way. As we get into the endgame, I expect there will be sharp imbalances of power between those that play the endgame well and those who lose out. Overall, I see the US as excessively focused on winning the endgame, as zero-sum, and would rather see a more cooperative plan to bring the world safely over to sustainable energy.
• The top-heavy Western economies. One might title this the crisis of capitalism, but I think that would be inaccurate. The issue is not about the normative system of property that we use in the West but about the emergent distribution of ownership that has resulted over the years. It is top heavy. The major part of western economies is not primarily productive but is a superstructure that concentrates wealth. This doesn’t mean everyone in the superstructure is rich – they might be an ordinary bank clerk, but still fundamentally unproductive. The crisis is that the primarily productive layers are increasingly unable to support the passive consumption of this superstructure, or their occasional abuses such as the recent financial crisis.
• Conflict between the West and Asia over property rights. China, India, Korea, and some other Asian economies already control the world’s means of production. These consist in productive capital, such as factories and industrial techniques, and the exploitable labor of their people. These economies, by being younger, are not as top-heavy as western ones. What prevents, say, China from selling their own Macs and iPhones is a system of intellectual and other property rights organized mainly by the US. I expect the Asian powers to challenge that, either by disobedience or more forcefully. Also, wars are started when a military power such as the US wants to take over an exploitable resource such as Chinese labor from the power that’s currently exploiting it.

So, the future will probably bring forced lifestyle changes, serious economic discomfort at least for us in the west, and possibly a kind of war. A global war may be too destructive to undertake (and I hope it is thus averted) but I think a more limited conflict such as the one that keeps the Middle East under US control may unfold in Asia, to the misery of billions of people.

My short advice to you is stop worrying about terrorism, healthcare, global warming, and other minimal threats and start worrying about these real problems that will jeopardize life in the 21st century.