Anyone can take precautions if they have zero cost, of if they appear to have zero marginal cost. There is therefore a tendency to reduce the marginal cost of various precautions, processes, regular forums, documents, and the like by turning them into a running waste. That’s an attempt to make management easier, or more precisely to make bad management less distinguishable from good while sacrificing any efficiency.

Also, any vaguely competent functionary or committee can make tough decisions once the costs and benefits are unequivocally obvious. I once had a manager who, when faced with any important decision, asked his reports to gather all relevant information and present it in a table. He would only accept analysis that made the choice obvious, which is equivalent to saying he only made decisions of zero risk and zero marginal value.

The valuable work is to take decisions that are costly now to gain benefits or avoid risks that are as yet unseen in the future. The good manager is alone, or at least needs to have peers who are above the daily affairs of their team and are able to look into the longer horizon. Effective management has to be empowered, like business, so that risks and gains can be balamced and foresight applied.

Israel was formed by people who shared enough of a language, culture, and religion to see themselves as a nation even though they were a diaspora, or an ethnic group living in imperial lands. They revived or manufactured a national ideal on dubious claims of historical continuity. They created their state through sheer determination and no small amount of treachery and underground support. They defended and grew their state against destruction using ardent, incontestable violence.

That’s how every other nation state in the old world came to be. Greece did exactly the same things in the 1820s, as did the Balkan countries. The nation states of Europe had formed in similarly violent ways, justified on similarly new and artificial national identities, only a century earlier. This behaviour was thought normal of nations until the 1920s. If Israel had been formed in the 1840s, say, and it was still extinguishing its Arab minority in 1910 by interning them and blockading their supplies, no-one would protest. That’s what nations did, back then.

Unfortunately the world’s experiments with ethically pure nation states are over. This idea burned with the houses of Dresden and Tokyo, and in two large explosions over Japan. By the time the war was over it was clear to all technically advanced societies that another round of tribal warfare between nation states would negate them, if not all life on the planet. In a world of six billion people, half of them commanding nuclear arms, the unfettered nation state is practically untenable.

When the full horror of the holocaust was uncovered, it became clear that the nation state was also morally bankrupt. Races of people with a language and a culture, like the Jews, existed relatively happily in empires. Rome, Byzantium, the Moors, the Ottomans, the British, or the Americans didn’t have a particular issue against Jews. Neither did the feudal lords of France, Germany, or Eastern Europe. Forms of governance that are not based on kin are, by definition, tolerant, or at least tolerant of who you are by birth.

Nation states are different. They demand that the state is for one race only. Any sizeable minority who are caught in its territory must be expelled or exterminated, since the state has to be nationally pure, and in any case the nationalist ideology doesn’t extend moral empathy any wider. A guest diaspora is a particular problem for a nation state, since in its own terms these people have divided allegiance. Fascism is a natural tendency for a nation state, and for the most fascist state of all Jews and Gypsies were impossible, incomprehensible elements that it sought to destroy. Clearly the Third Reich included conflicting notions of nation state and empire, and it’s their nationalism that we mostly identify with their crimes. An empire can’t swallow a continent and then complain that its people are diverse or stateless. But the monster of nationalist ideology was already rabid.

It’s a tragic irony that the people who survived the greatest horror in the name of European nationalism now want to have their go at the nationalist project, just as Europe is dismantling it. Do they not see themselves veering towards the same kind of crimes? Israelis don’t put Palestinians in death camps, of course, but they’re only more civilised by degree. They put Palestinians in walled enclaves, effectively internment camps, with no clear prospect of exit. They merely keep them undersupplied with medicines and other basics, and only kill a few occasionally. They destroy homes and don’t allow rebuilding, but at least in Israel it’s warm. Israeli (and Jewish, and World) public opinion would recoil at any attempt to destroy the Palestinian people efficiently. So Israel pursues a policy of destroying them slowly, generation by generation.

Israel clearly and forthrightly wants one thing. It wants all the good land between the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aqaba, the Jordan river and Golan for the Jews. Just as Greece wanted all the land at the south tip of the Balkans for the Greeks. It’s a nation state for one people. From the point of view of Israel the palestinians are not a menace, they’re an inconvenience. Israel simply wants them to disappear.

It would all have been much simpler if the Palestinians, once displaced, were absorbed by neighboring Arab nations. Forced population exchanges happened many times through the nation formations in south-eastern Europe in the 1910s and 20s. Although they were brutal and lacking any measure of fairness, on the whole the human outcome was far better than any prolonged settlement dispute could have been. But the surrounding Arab nations closed their borders to Palestinians or settled them in conflict zones, using them as pawns to prevent the establishment of peace and normality with Israel as part of the region. In this they are complicit.

Had history ran a course similar to that which gave us Greece or Bulgaria in the 19th century, as anyone could reasonably have predicted, we’d probably have a nation state of Israel substantially at peace with its neighbours. There might be some tense posturing from time to time for political effect, but on the whole the region would be growing a much finer class of problems such as demands that Israel and Lebanon enter the EU at the same time. That Israel might still seem parochial, but it would be reasonable.

Unfortunately it’s too late to take that path. The Palestinians are by now Israel’s responsibility, and Israel has to deal with them. There’s only one moral and viable way to move forward, and that is to abandon the idea of Israel as a nation state, for Jews only. It doesn’t just have Jews. It has Jews and Arabs, and realistically any state in that location is going to see some Christians and various other minorities. Any form of governance that aspires to peace and acceptance, today and in these circumstances, has to be multi-ethnic. This may be a chagrin to those Jews who cling to a racially pure Zionist ideal. Too bad. Too late. Are they, in any case, anything but a fanatic fringe?

A multi-ethnic Israel doesn’t have to mean a raft prone to be swallowed by the surrounding Muslim world. It means a multi-ethnic state with a constitution that recognises and protects at least two main minorities. It means separation of church and state and rights that safeguard tolerance. It means equal opportunity laws and a balanced independent legal system. It also means mostly Jewish corporations and an army mainly staffed by Jews, for the time being, just as in the United States capital and rank is mostly in the hands of whites and that’s tolerated rather than enshrined. By any measure a multi-ethnic Israel would be a beacon to the region, if only Israeli conservatives would tolerate the idea and the elites of surrounding Arab nations would let it happen.

What is happening right now is not working, and is not going to work unless we wait for the slow extinction of the Palestinian minority and then pronounce the resulting peace a success. Israel is accused of occupying the land. It isn’t. An occupation is something temporary, and it’s assumed that the invader will leave, as the Americans will eventually leave Iraq once favorable arrangements for extracting the oil are secured. Israel isn’t occupying Palestine, and it’s unproductive to suggest that it is. Israel has won the land. The Jews have also done so much that is positive on the land that they have a claim of putting it to good use, just as the European settlers have a bona fide, although not a just, claim to the use of North America. These are not changes that you can undo.

Rather, the crime is that Israel is practicing apartheid. It is enclosing the Palestinian minority in walled enclaves on low-quality land that cannot provide a livelihood. It expropriates and blocks the movement of goods and people. It denies Palestinians fair access to a shared economy, or the freedom to pursue a viable economy of their own. There is a notion that a two-state settlement, with a prosperous Jewish state and an impoverished Palestinian state that’s not even geographically continuous, might be a solution for peace. That is fantasy. Israel today is like South Africa under apartheid, except that the repressed group is the less numerous. The whole land, for both people, is the only realistic path to peace.

If Israel really wants to live in the 19th century, or practice what in the 20th century we called apartheid, it needs to be punished. Now, anyone who criticises Israel is asked if they deny Israel’s right to exist. That phrase is about as unhelpful as talk of occupation. No one is suggesting that a march of Muslim jihadists be allowed to drive the Jewish people into the sea. On the other hand does Israel have the right to be an apartheid state? Of course not. Why should it? No state has that right any more. Israel has to choose between being a backward, 19th century state with 19th century international relations and economic prospects, or being admitted into the 21st century as an open and multi-ethnic society.

This may sound like asking the victims of the most terrible crimes, even as they face ongoing threats, to rise up and be better than their agressors. Yes, that is the idea! Israel has to rise up to this challenge and build a fair multi-ethnic society, despite having the moral cache of surviving a near genocide and the real threat of extremism or war. Otherwise, it’s just a miserable strip of land with two morally bankrupt peoples fighting. That’s unnecessarily too bleak a prospect, and one not fair to the hopes of the majority of both peoples.

North Korea should be an easy case
From the point of view of the center-right Western powers, Cuba is a difficult case. There’s communism that actually works well in terms of human development indicators and outcomes are dramatically better than the nearby basket cases of Haiti, Dominican Republic, or Grenada. So if you want to change the regime of Cuba that should be difficult, as it has been. Now look at North Korea. It is an economic and human ruin. The state is as a fascist horror and it is also hollow. There’s no pretense at ideology that might, perhaps, if everyone went along with it, work. North Korea is simply the personal fiefdom of one family of hereditary rulers. Neighbouring South Korea, although not free from struggle and suffering, is a glowing success by any standards. The two countries share a culture. If there was ever an easy case for regime change, North Korea should be it. Why is it so hard to depose one dictator and his sons and allow the country to unite with its powerful developed sibling, just like Germany? I remember in the late 80s Mr Gorbachev did a tour of the Eastern Bloc countries, presumably had a frank chat with each of their leaders, and they all toppled a few months later. Isn’t it time for Mr Jintao to pay a visit to Mr Jong-Il?

The Lib Dems blew it
The worst thing a politician can do, short of being personally caught in corruption, is to openly seek power for its own sake. There has to be a reason for coming to power, such as to fix social ills or otherwise enact positive policies. Seeking power for love of power is, and should be, a signal to vote the politician out of office. While it was reasonable for Britain’s Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg to join a coalition with the conservatives, the Lib Dems were voted in because of their stance on policy, which is different from the Conservatives’ policy. An honorable coalition would thus be a compromise, where Clegg accepts a share of government but affirms that his policies are distinct from Cameron’s. The two leaders should be visibly in conflict, most of the time. Instead, Clegg was so delighted to get a shot at government after his party was excluded that he essentially hired his and his MP’s services to the Conservatives. In my view this is not lost on the Lib Dem electorate, and I expect the party to be consigned to the backwaters of British politics for decades due to this mistake.

Why not lose €0.10?
The Euro is clearly in some trouble. The larger EU economies have had to absorb risky debt from Greece, and it looks likely that they may have to absorb some more from Portugal, Spain, or some other weak economy. German chancellor Merkel wants the solution to be fiscal prudence for all member states, so that no-one can run budget deficits. Although a good long-term goal, this is naive as a short-term solution in my opinion. Germany and a few other countries are unusual in being able to run surplus budgets. Even powerful states such as France or the US run deficits. And Germany or China wouldn’t run surpluses if other states didn’t run deficits. For historical reasons Germany doesn’t keep a large army, while Greece and the UK do (for different reasons). EU convergence must run a lot further ahead before member states can be treated like municipalities, which are able to draw on central support but are expected to balance their books. So in the absence of such miracles, there are three ways to resolve the Euro risky debt/deficit issue: Default, austerity, and devaluation. The last option is clearly preferable but it is taboo. Why? Surely a modest drop of the Euro, say 10c, would calm markets while hurting very little, if not benefiting the export economies. What sort of reasoning or interests keep this obvious option off the table?

The state that we think we have, the nation state, has only had a short and brutish existence. European nation states took their present form in the 18th or 19th century. Before this there were other forms of governance — empires, city states, feudalism — with varying degrees of size, ethnic cohesion, strict or lax laws, open or closed borders, etc. The most striking difference though has been the relationship of people with government, ranging from equal partnership to open exploitation. The nation state brought three centuries of coercive policy making coupled with paternalistic welfare.

Today the nation state is in crisis, not so much because of open borders or because the clan wars that it caused threaten to tear the world apart, but because its social contract is in crisis. The modern state can neither enforce policy nor provide welfare with credibility, and we’re not collectively sure if it should. We need a clear model of the state and its role.

What is a state supposed to be then? From the perspective of the social contract, in other words the deal between the citizens and government, we have three prevailing models in the West:

• The state as kin. The state is a large family. You’re accepted as a member if you are biologically related as offspring or mate of another. The state looks after the collective good of the kin, to the detriment of those non-kin. That may mean coercion within the state to make sacrifices, and war against foreigners. Since the membership of the state is closed, the state may wish to participate in relationships with other states but does not wish to open borders or be subsumed in greater entities. Examples: Israel, Japan.
• The state as a charter. The state has a territory in which certain rules apply, to everyone. The belief is that prosperity, justice, and human flourishing follows from an open society based on good rules. The charter state is open to all people, but needs to defend its jurisdiction and its charter in order for the latter to be meaningful. The state sometimes has to intervene between people to defend the promise made to all, and may wish to export its charter or create a greater chartist structure. Example: France.
• The state as a service. The state collects subscriptions, usually called taxes, builds infrastructure, and provides services: Defense, health, information, transport, banking, pensions, communications, etc. It retains a monopoly for some of these services, it’s a wholesales for others, and a retailer for some more. It prefers being a monopoly-wholesaler, leaving retail to private firms. The state doesn’t care that much about kin or territory, but rather cares about solvency, revenue, and entitlement or otherwise of service users. This state sees itself first among equals in relation with private firms. Example: Britain.

These conceptions of the state are very different, but we don’t usually see that because we’re used to the kind of state that we live in. In a world going through rapid globalization, we need active debate on the types and roles of states that we want to bring about in the future.

In my opinion, the state as kin is indefensible after 1945. Most of Europe has accepted this as consensus and thus the EU was created, largely on a chartist vision from France. A few notable nation states remain, due to their exceptional circumstances:

• Japan remains as nation state due to the long period of isolation in its past. Eventually I think it will become chartist, over many generations.
• Israel created a nation state after 1945, ironically to escape the horrors vested upon the Jews by the rampant nation states of Europe. It’s simply late to the game. Nation states are over, and Israel has to become either a chartist government of the region with a responsibility to all people, or a welfare state for Jews that can co-exist with a similar one for others.
• South Africa was a clearly indefensible state of the Afrikaans kin, and that structure was dismantled.

The United States is divided among all three influences. The founding of the American state was clearly chartist, and France even gave them a nice statue as a gift to celebrate this. For most of its history, however, the US acted as the state of the Anglo-Saxon kin. It embraced those Europeans who were closest to the kin, such as Germans, tolerated others such as Italians, and abused those who were clearly not kin: Blacks, latinos, asians. The Anglo-Saxon America clearly had no qualms about attacking distant, non-white people. The third influence, which is gaining ground, is to see sates and the federal government as financial services firms, with a few R&D departments, that provide a kind of backbone to private enterprise.

The EU stated out with the explicit claim to end the clan wars that ravaged the region for millennia. In this it brilliantly succeeded. The earlier years of the EU, and most of its architecture, is chartist. It unifies rules, creates enforcement mechanisms, and tries to ensure openness. In my opinion it lacks corresponding development of its services role. There has to be a unified approach to taxation, citizen’s obligations, and citizen’s entitlements between member states. That doen’t mean they should be the same, but rather they all need to be comparable and equally fair, and there needs to be an open way for citizens to join, leave, and transfer between welfare systems as they move through the EU.

I don’t know enough about China and India to characterise them. From a western perspective, China appears to be a kin state. It’s organised as a patriarchal family, where citizens are supposed to respect authority and work on common goals, in exchange for protection. Dissidents are severely punished. If that’s really true, China’s saving grace its lack of expansionist or imperialist tendencies. Even so I worry that a kin state containing one fifth of the word’s people will lead to conflict or exploitation depending on how those outside the kin organize themselves. By comparison, India appears to be so variegated that it’s not a credible kin state. It has strong chartist and some services elements, which I think is better for the long term welfare of the people in the region. I don’t know enough about it though.

These are important questions that need to be at the center of policy. If we ignore them the growth and diversification of private firms into providers of everything, from search to phones and from groceries to mortgages, will push states into a similar and shrinking role. You’ll buy healthcare from Tesco or from the NHS. You’ll use an infrastructure made by Google or by DARPA. You’ll pay your debt to the fed, or HSBC, or GE. What is the difference? That is a de-facto libertarian society.

A libertarian society may be a valid vision for the future. I sincerely doubt it, but the point is the world’s citizens shouldn’t sleepwalk into it while capital pushes it.

Merkel needs to go!
The German leader ought to be defeated in the next elections for blowing the handling of the Greek debt crisis. She’s been incredibly naive to treat the matter as a solvency issue for one country. Greece, for all it’s failures, just happened to be the weakest of the small indebted Euro economies. Financial markets speculated against it, and Europe failed to see the problem as what it was and stop it in time. Sarkozy and even Obama urged Merkel to bring solidarity in the Euro but she thought voters wouldn’t like it. Then the Greek crisis became a Euro credibility crisis, with markets devaluing the Euro and influential economists such as Krugman and Mankiw writing that the Euro may be “over”. To be sure, German voters won’t be happy, but they’ll be unhappy about Merkel’s colossal failure of leadership over the Euro zone. Update: EU leaders got their act together on Monday.

And did Brown really need to go?
Every few years the British media go off a politician. The previous one was Ken Livingstone, the somewhat socialist but very pragmatic and effective mayor of London. After praising him for several years the media suddenly decided he was a joke. They didn’t have any specific issue with his policies, they just declared he was finished. Same with Gordon Brown this last election. Everyone agreed that he handled the financial crisis pretty well and that his main shortcoming was an almost complete lack of charisma (probably a relief after Blair who had too much). Yet the media decided he had to go. No reason given, just go… Is that a democratic press?

Yay for incompetent bombers
By all indications the guy who planted a car bomb in New York was a random person who became unhappy with the way things are, started adopting more extreme views, and eventually decided that blowing people up would improve matters. He was kind of useless at making bombs, and you wonder if he really intended, with 100% of his mind, to kill people. Americans should be thankful that events turned out as they are. They should listen to his story, give him a prison term, and be done with it. The point for thought is what could society do differently so that these “outliers” don’t show up every few years. The wrong message is to drum up fear and go on a hunt for villains in the mountains, as even progressive media appear to be doing.

This must seem like tragic madness to outsiders, and even to many who live in Greece. When societies fail, it’s easy to conclude that people are irrational, that therefore there’s no prospect for improvement, and that imposing a basic plan or order upon them might be a good idea. Let me try and allay these notions.

Greeks are upset about the economic hardship that they now face. In this they are partly justified and partly naive. Greece was never rich, but it lived on borrowed money and immigrant labour for nearly twenty years, so now it feels poorer. Greeks would like the government to do something about their economic situation. Greece has relatively generous employment laws, like Germany, so the labour market and the pace of structural change in the economy are slow (when they are followed). The government is liberalising the labour market and Greeks are reasonably protesting because there’s no link between that concession and any specific growth prospects, and once the concession is made it’ll stay whether or not the economy improves.

What Greeks ought to be protesting even louder, and holding their politicians to discipline over, is failure to develop any strategy for economic growth. Greece has a mentality of economic servitude. There’s supposed to be some focus of wealth — the government, the EU, the abstract concept of tourism — and Greeks are used to attaching themselves to such a source of revenue, preferably for life. That worked, of sorts, when the country was economically insignificant. Now that it’s a reasonably-sized Western economy it has to produce as much as it consumes, and Greeks are incredibly naive not to face up to this reality. Both the public and politicians are arguing about moving the bar of entitlement a small amount up or down, without considering economic realities. A shared concept of economic growth, or the discourse needed to develop it, are absent.

Greece is structured as a strong welfare state, like France or Germany, but large scale industry never developed and aggregate output is way short of entitlement. Since the 1980s Greece has pursued a poor imitation of the American dream, becoming a highly individual, materialist, and power-seeking society. For a small country that’s delusional. Some people would like Greece to become more socialist, like the ex. Yugoslavia or the Nordic countries. It’s also possible that Greece could develop an entrepreneurial high-tech economy like Israel, hopefully without a war. In terms of tradition, family values, and temperament the cultures are quite similar. But the question of growth is not discussed. Only schoolchildren persistently bring it up, and the older generation brushes them aside.

There’s also a second issue. Many Greeks are enraged at their government’s dismal human rights record. That’s something both domestic and international media would prefer to ignore. Greece had a fascist dictatorship as recently as 1973, when it was normal practice for the police to abduct and torture dissidents. There followed forty years of democracy, ultraconservative at first but now similar to the centrist governments of other western states. Crucially, a reconciliation and cleanup process never happened. The first democratic leaders didn’t have the stomach for it, and subsequent ones hoped that the whole issue would be forgotten as affluence and European integration carried the country forward.

For a while it looked like Greek police had become a civilised agency, but the main victims of its abuses were immigrants – mainly informal workers and prostitutes from Eastern Europe. Over the last ten years these countries have found their equilibrium, and those immigrants who are still in Greece either became Greek or at least settled as long-term guest labourers. A small Kurdish minority, which could best be described as refugees from persecution in Turkey, was rounded up and hidden from sight a few months before the 2004 Olympics. Athens has small urban slums of Far-Eastern vendors and labourers and African prostitutes, but these are small areas and whatever the police does to these people is not widely seen. Recently, however, the police has been running out of invisible targets.

Some changes that styled police like a professional force were gradually reversed, and now they look and behave like a barely restrained occupying army. Police troops patrol in fatigues and carry automatic weapons. At demonstrations they hurt people — and not the few who come angry and prepared to fight with the police. Those usually know how to run away. Riot police beat random people, sometimes very young, sometimes old, severely enough to send them to hospital with serious injuries. Police release dogs on demonstrators or charge at them two on a motorcycle, running them over sometimes or the rider striking random people on the head with a steel club. That terror tactic serves its purpose of keeping the more compliant and “decent” people away from demonstrators. It is not picked up by the media.

There are also an increasing number of individual cases of severe abuse or death. Two were so extreme that they shocked the public for months:

• On 6 December 2008 a 15 year old high school student, Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot by the police after an altercation. The incident sparked days of riots (Wikipedia).
• On 22 December 2008 an immigrant trade union leader at a cleaning firm, Konstantina Kouneva, was attacked with sulphuric acid (a powerful corrosive) and suffered severe burns in her face, eyes, oesophagus, and stomach (Amnesy International UK). This attack was carried out by unknown thugs, but no satisfactory investigation took place despite the obvious appearance of a labour-related terror attack involving a specific firm.

There are more cases that are less celebrated, if that is the word. Greeks see these events come to pass and conclude, correctly, that there is a failure of governance. There is specifically a failure, or rather a callous unwillingness, of those who hold the monopoly of violence to protect the citizens. When Greeks riot, what they are saying is that the police do not have the public mandate to hold the monopoly of violence. One clumsy, visceral way to reclaim it is to riot. Another desperate and misguided way is to attack the police, and there have been isolated attacks and even murders of police by random extremists.

As peaceful people get assaulted at demonstrations, most of those who witness it become fearful and disengaged. A few, however, become radicalised and they show up at the next demonstration eager to fight the police. The same happens when the police fails the public trust, low as it is. A cycle of violence develops, not unlike the kind that persists in occupied territories between disempowered youths and the much more powerful occupying force. That’s how it happens. It may be tragic and senseless but it’s not insane and real governance issues are behind the violence. These issues could potentially admit solutions and need to be brought in the open.

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.

For most of time, myth was the dominant means for controlling our experience. If someone fell ill, the village could attempt a cure, or they could make the illness and possible passing away more tolerable through a shared imagination supported by art, mythical narrative, and ceremony. Faced with danger, people invented mythical protectors but also monsters to regulate that fear, as well as imaginary refuge of various kinds. People filled expanses of nature such as the forest, the mountains, or the sea with imaginary creatures and places, affording themselves a rich experience of these otherwise inaccessible environments.

When we look at other cultures we underestimate how much they control their environment. We see hunter gatherers of the present day and think that they live in nature. Not so. They live in a theater of experience constructed with art, ceremonies, tradition, belief, and imagination – much like ours but on an open stage. When we visit a great cathedral we admire it as a triumph of construction. That’s ironic, because the great construction was the artificial world of religion that it once radiated, transforming the entire city. We’re like kids who examine an old movie projector at the museum without ever having seen one switched on.

Myth is like beer, the other great technology for affecting perception. They have had an interesting relationship through history. Sometimes it has been complementary, such as in mysteries where ceremony and intoxication are used together to generate an intense alternate reality. At other times the relationship appears to be antagonistic, with religions attempting to be the monopoly providers of a constructed perception. The great advantage of myth is that it is socially constructed. Myth avoids the solipsism problem. Living in an imaginary world, but one that’s shared with your fellow human beings, is a meaningful life. Living in a private illusion is a kind of death. The need to inhabit the same world as each other seems deeply wired in us.

Myth is humanist. Belief in myth affirms that only the perception of the world by humans matters, and the physical world is not in itself important. Materialism is worth pursuing only insofar as it leads, indirectly, to a new shared experience of humanity that is, in some subjective way, better. It’s not ignorance that led the majority of human generations to build their societies around myth. It’s just that materialism didn’t look like a useful belief system until the development of agriculture, and even then the balance of credibility was unclear. The bold stance of living materially, without myth, didn’t emerge as a serious consideration until the renaissance. The story of human thought is the story of one humanist technology, myth, being replaced by a more promising technology, science, and not some tale of liberation from the forces of darkness.

The world doesn’t compel us to believe in any particular thing. Certainly not truth. We believe what we want, and we’re all realists and mystics in some measure. We accept new beliefs according to what is most compatible with beliefs we already hold, and what accommodates with our psychological needs. Many of us gather a mix of practical realism, objectivity, convention, and comforting principles that’s close to what would serve us best. Others evidently suffer under their own beliefs, feeling oppressed in mysticism or empty in realism. What we cannot do is move our belief system voluntarily. Someone who becomes more rational is absorbing a web of rational beliefs, not willing their mind towards reason.

Consideration of what belief system would best serve another human being is the only valid moral guide for anyone who seeks to change another’s beliefs. The believer who wishes to convert others to a religion using some argument from dogma, about the existence of god, a duty, or anything of the sort is acting out of simple selfishness. Faiths want more people to support their myth, so that suspension of disbelief is more effective. Understandable perhaps but not moral. The atheist who admonishes people to see the world as it is, or stop believing in nonsense, is just as callous and immature. They’re like the headmaster who takes your beer away because “it’s bad for you” or like the fool who stands up in the theater to point out that Juliet is not dead. Debating faith on the basis of rationality, or the opposite, is a useless and agressive stance, as it denies the other person’s worth.

Myth is not going away, nor should it. When we see ourselves as the complex web of ideas that we are, part of this realisation is frightening. It’s very uncomfortable to become aware of the core ideas, the root nodes of the graph, our moral axioms, our principles, our metaphysics – but we all have them. Some people personify them, leading to the belief system where purpose comes from god. Others use the instincts of human empathy and connectedness as the basis and try to live a good life as social beings. Still others become fixated on the pursuit of ideals (money, ideology) or become addicted to pleasure from time to time. But we all have our private metaphysics, our own existential myth that drives us forward in an otherwise indifferent universe.

Myth is an evolutionary adaptation. There’s no rational imperative to prefer a world with flourishing human beings over one that is desolate. Our individual urges to stay alive, have children, and do good are instincts created by our evolutionary past. Death is frightening not because it is the end of life but because it calls the value and conduct of our life into question. A mind without foresight, such as the minds of animals lacking a large frontal lobe, can live on instincts alone. We use myth to isolate our instincts and basic drives from our conscious mind, and in this way protect ourselves from nihilism.

This post is dedicated to Paul Crowley and Alison Rowan, whose opposed perspectives, as I remember them, illuminate this discussion. It’s been a long time coming. Enjoy Beltane.

Pavlos’s Thoughts – Episode 2 – The Greek financial crisis

Talking post (podcast). Click to open as MP3.

Key points:

• The core problem is that the Greek economy is unproductive in structure and ethos.
• Greece will probably have to default against the debt market, if not now then later.
• It would be better if the EU dealt with the issue instead, by taking over and restructuring some debt.
• The EU should probably create a framework to deal with national solvency in a consolidated way.
• Fortunately the Greek economy has poor coupling, and could be protected temporarily by price controls.
• In the long run the solution is to make Greece more productive by fixing exactly that – creating high coupling of innovative firms with the international economy. The best way to do that is probably to create international economic zones, which work in English by Western rules.

Feedback:

What do you make of that? Well, there are four explanations.

• Dad is a hero. He’s a judge in a high-profile corruption case. You need the protection for noble reasons, and you need courage.
• You live in a really rough neighbourhood and need the protection just because the family is well off, which is sad and cause for thought.
• Dad has his priorities misplaced. Maybe he’s too afraid of other people, or maybe he needs to care for the family more in other ways.
• Dad is a gangster. He knows just why there may be bricks or bullets coming through the window and, in order to continue being a gangster, he needs to arrange security.

If dad is your government, especially the government of the United States, I think the last explanation is most likely.

You’re in a gangster family. It may look cosy and civilized at home, and dad may be treating you and mom very well, but on another part of the neighborhood dad’s goons are breaking the arms of anyone who tries to develop in a socialist way (Vietnam), sell its oil to the wrong people (Iraq), or simply stand up and defy the racket (Serbia).

That may cause bricks, or even bullets, co come flying through the window. That’s why you need Homeland Security. The honorable TSA who protects you in good faith, and the high-tech scanner, are there so that dad can continue being a gangster while having a normal family life. Domestic security is a moral hazard.

Yes, I do regard the US troops in the gulf as goons. The same goes for the ones that a long time ago brutalized Vietnam, and most other smaller deployments with few exceptions. Although I appreciate the risk that they take, and realize that many if not most consider that they are making a heroic sacrifice, I just see them as unfortunate. They’re sometimes misguided and usually powerless ordinary people put in a terrible position by profiteering elites, like most soldiers in history. That may be too bleak a reality, but a reality it is. I feel some compassion for the troops as well as their victims, but no support.

Please also understand that although I’m naming the US state as the gangster, I don’t wish to imply that Americans, or their officials, are a bad stock of people. The previous world gangster was Britain, and the last one before them on a comparable scale was the Romans. Various lesser gangsters do the same thing. America just happens to be the top don right now. People are morally equal the world over, and people in power are usually the worst ones everywhere. It’s the function of domestic security as a moral hazard that I want to comment on.

Since WW2, what the US troops and policies do is uphold US interests, and in the case of the Third World that means aggressive “we win, you lose” interests. The pattern is consistent from Truman to Bush. The global standing and conduct of the US was different up to WW2, and Obama hasn’t so far started a gangster venture of his own.

Mostly the victims of the racket are weak and decent folk, like Latin America, so when the goons come nobody talks about it. The muslim world has proved to be a defiant family business. Maybe the stakes over the world’s last remaining oil are too high, maybe religion and identity are strong, or maybe they just have unruly sons. Anyway, after extortion had gone on for some time, someone through a brick through the gangster’s window. That was back in 2001, and the bloody reprisals are just ending.

Yes, although on a human scale September 11 was a terrible murder, on the scale of global power it was a brick through the window. It was a way of saying “fuck you” like when some unknown person in Edinburgh sent a brick through the window of Fred Goodwin, ex boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, for profiteering at the expense of the bank and society.

At the level that terrorism happens today, thankfully, it’s resentment. Somebody is immensely angry or feels (wrongly in general) that causing some pain to the gangster or his family will improve matters. That goes for terrorism against superpowers – terrorism over occupied territory is a different game. Terrorism with weapons of mass destruction would be the equivalent of gang warfare.

The point of all this is that domestic security is a moral hazard, and its strength is an indicator of unethical state conduct. It allows the state to make enemies without fear of repercussions. If security is high, you can be confident that enemy-making is well and good, and going to continue. Unless you want the gangster lifestyle, making enemies of ordinary people is both immoral (the things you do to them) and unproductive. No family would really want to have that kind of relationship with the world, and no state should either.

What, then, is to be done? Should Homeland Security be scaled back so that terrorists can kill people more easily to express their resentment? No. I’m not suggesting that the level of security can be used as an independent variable. You need whatever security you need. However, Homeland Security should be used as an indicator. Remember that during Bush they were fond of using that color-coded scale? That ugly theater prop was surprisingly fitting, in a way.

First, security is not to be celebrated. Any official demand for security must be questioned. If the executive asks for additional security measures, ask them what they did to need them. A genuine need for security is shame. If the state makes a good case that the enemies are genuine, then the public must see it as a problem to live in a state that has real enemies.

The US media have shown some agility in portraying terrorists both as criminal extremists and as irregular enemy combattants, using whatever metaphor suits. They have portrayed the problem of world security as irrational. Terrorists are mad. They blow people up because they have views that don’t even fit into a world order of the present time. Well that’s not accurate. They have recognizable demands and criminal methods, like the Somali pirates. The media don’t portray the pirates as mad, and neither are the terrorists. Both are sane and in the wrong.

The media also assert, especially using September 11 as an example, that we’re at the stage of gang warfare. That the enemies of the US are out to commit genocide, and that if they had access to weapons of mass destruction they would use them. That message is deeply unproductive. We’re at the stage of bricks through the window (bad as it is, when it means that innocent people are murdered). The claim that a weak nation is willing to let genocidal acts be committed against a strong has not been demonstrated, is in my view false, and to propagate this myth is morally reckless.

Secondly, the real problems of political security need to be tackled. Large parts of the world’s population should not be enemies of the US, or whoever might be the top superpower at another time. Policies that make these people, mostly poor people, hate the masters of the world must be changed, and that means, to be blunt, no more coercion of wealth and power away from the poor and towards the rich. That in turn means a less extravagant lifestyle, or at least consumption, for the ex-gangster’s family. It does mean bringing the lives of the best and the worst off closer together, and if you are the spoilt child of the gangster family that will take some disillusionment. Material compromise is needed here, in order to achieve harmony and progress.

Of course, there will always be a few people who take extreme views at odds with their community. That might be said of neo-nazi or libertarian terrorists native to the West, for example. These should be approached as criminals, which also means with due process and respect for human rights. Some such extremists may be found in the Middle East, or anywhere really, even in a world order that is just. However, Interpol and not Homeland Security would be the right agency to guard against them.

When the world superpower stops doing evil, it needs also to do some good. There’s plenty of resentment built up around the world, and it will fade with the generations, but it would be better if it fades faster. America (and Europe, and China) must be seen to lead the world and bring it to a good place, and that means actually doing things that are good for the world. It doesn’t just mean better PR. The same wish is expressed by many, for reasons that are not only to do with security.

Then, when the world is more just and the United States is seen in a positive moral light, security should actually be scaled back. This is a difficult one. Security is sticky. No-one wants to be the politician who cuts back on security just before people get blown up. To some extent, security has to rise steadily in response to the technical sophistication of extremists, but it’s far above the curve today. When foreign public resentment is reliably low, and an honest assessment of threat shows the need for security to be genuinely low, excess security should actually be trimmed off.

Security should be at the lowest, not the highest, level consistent with safety because that is the correct moral incentive to any government. The government whose citizens are protected no more than those of any other people around the world is one that is acting morally – not because fear of terrorism holds the state hostage but because an undertaking to its own people to function without the moral hazard of perfect security is an undertaking to function morally.

Coercive leadership is what you get in a dictatorship, or a pack of dogs. The leader is whoever took the post by force. They stay in power as long as they can defeat or deter challengers, which requires that the leader is the strongest, literally or in the sense of being the most ruthless. There is a top-down power structure that keeps the majority in line by reminding them that they have no choice.

Charismatic leadership is what you find in a band, or other relatively fresh voluntary association. The leader is perceived as being the best at whatever is the aim of the organization. Followers follow the leader because they value their inspiration and direction. Any challengers would have to demonstrate superior ability, rather than attack the leader as such.

Conventional leadership is the kind found in democratic states and other large, mature organizations. The leader has no distinguishing characteristics other than fairness and commitment. The members of the organization subscribe to the leadership because they see the benefits of structure and coherence. The leader is expected to identify and publish a consensus direction, but not primarily to steer the group.

All three kinds of leadership have validity, including the coercive one in certain contexts. Problems in leadership typically occur when the leader misrepresents, is not true to, or changes the kind of leadership that they are in charge of.

States are almost always structured as coercive, because of their roots in ethnic and class conflict. They emphasize forced compliance with laws and have a large domestic enforcement apparatus. This does democratic polity a disservice. Substantially, modern states are conventionally led. Laws are obeyed and institutions observed when the majority think that those are useful. Coercing the majority is unproductive. Dissent ought to be accommodated and outright enforcement reserved for those who are too selfish or short sighted to abide by the norm.

From time to time states get a charismatic leader. It’s not clear whether these are good or bad. Kennedy was charismatic but he escalated the Vietnam war, nearly triggereed WW3, and sent people on impressive but useless trips to the moon. Gorbachev was a conventional leader who embarked on the task, deemed necessary by consensus, of modernising the Soviet state through a reformist path. I prefer Gorbachev. Charismatic leaders are also prone to idolization, so that the nation feels that only a supposedly higher grade of person can provide leadership.

Businesses, unfortunately, use a mixture of the three forms of leadership and change the balance between them from time to time. New businesses in the traditional economy are usually coercive, since whoever has the founding capital has the power. Tech startups are usually founded on charismatic leadership, and not much more. As businesses grow, whoever is in charge of each department or function implements it according to their concept of leadership, resulting in an inconsistent mix.

Mature businesses ought to be conventionally led, providing their members with a large measure of autonomy in exchange for responsibility. Many have this culture, and most are less coercive than states. Businesses work with carrots, states with sticks. Even so, the transition that businesses make to conventional leadership is often imperfect. Classic businesses retain too much of their coercive heritage, while new economy firms find it hard to make the transition from charismatic to conventional while retaining value.

If you want to be a leader, you must be very clear and forthright about the model of leadership that you and the group are signing up to. When you get a mandate, you get a mandate to lead a certain way. If you’re coercive don’t try to smooth the bargain by pretending otherwise, and if you aren’t don’t touch coercive instrumens. If you’re charismatic, inspire and if you can’t do that step down. If you’re singing up as a conventional leader, be fair and represent; don’t steer.

Some people will enthusiastically follow you whichever type of leadership you are true to. Others will respect you but look elsewhere for the type that suits them. Nobody will appreciate it if you try to play more than one of these roles at once, or change it once in power. To change your form of leadership you need a new mandate.

If you dislike the leadership you’re under, coercive and charismatic leaderships are relatively easy to change. These forms are inherently unstable, and held together by fear or by the leader’s personal ability. If you’re brave enough to do so, you can challenge the leader and seek to replace them in their post, or bid to implement a different form of leadership. A transition from these forms to conventional leadership is usually popular.

The hardest kind of leadership to change is conventional leadership. The majority has so much invested in it that it’s almost impossible to even articulate a challenge that’s meaningful and yet within constructive bounds. That’s why democracies struggle with challenges that turn into riots. In business you have to break off and create a pocket of coercive or charismatic leadership to innovate. You will eventually have to return it to conventional leadership when it matures.

Microsoft marketing
You don’t really know what you want from your PC, and neither do we. We’re all in the same boat! So we made this software that has a whole bunch of features. Put it in your PC and it’ll do things. By the way your friends all have it, so if you go with the flow you’ll be able to share stuff.

Open Source marketing
User! You have no idea what you need and we’re not even going to attempt to tell you. Behind this link is our latest software, which we’re very proud of. If you use it, maybe you will see…

Guess who wins…

Microsoft, of course. They identify better with the user and address their anxieties, which are mainly about unknown future needs and social connection. It’s no surprise that they continue to have the largest market share, beyond what can be explained by lock-in or inertia.

Apple’s message appeals to customers who are sufficiently self-assured and clear about their needs to go for the product, and who want to be aloof to some extent. That’s a minority, but it’s growing as product categories such as PCs, media players, etc. become more settled and universally understood.

As for Open Source, this kind of defensive marketing tells consumers quite accurately and firmly that developers don’t care for them, and they’d better stay away. It’s a product for industry professionals, who appreciate the lack of a marketing layer. A few of the Open Source projects, such as Gnome are changing their image and aiming somewhere between Microsoft and Apple for their consumer appeal. That’s an improvement, but it’s a “me too” position without any unique attractiveness or solid reassurances aside from cost and freedom assurances. The latter may be winning points in government or emerging markets.

Google comes along as the late player, with marketing like this:

Google marketing
We noticed that you were doing these things a lot, so we’ve made it possible to do them on the web. We’ve put really smart people on it so it works right, and it’s free. Just use it. Click here. We promise not to be evil.

Will this work? Hard to say. Google is certainly building a reputation for making things that actually work, for everyone, without the different elitist characteristics of Apple and the FOSS people. However the burden of proof for Google is enormous. If a traditional software vendor wanted to be evil they’d have to sell you a malicious, or more likely compromised, product. With a hosted model like Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Docs, the vendor has all your data already and could in theory do with it what they like. The public, much as we like Google’s no-commitment services, is reluctant to commit that kind of trust just yet.

Despite this, somehow, the Greek school system managed to give me one valuable teaching.

It was the story of Antigone, by Sophocles. The story opens after an insurgency. Antigone’s brother, who had attempted to overthrow the king, has been defeated and lies dead on the street. The king declares that he is not to be buried, as a form of debasement. Antigone insists that he has to be buried, because that is their duty to the gods. They both insist, and the substance of the play is them making their case. The king sets out the formal, legal right. Antigone, the individual, argues that there is a moral right. The legal and the moral right are not always the same. And when they differ the moral right is compelling.

I don’t know how this 2500 year old brazen story of humanist conviction and rebellion managed to make it through the stolid, reactionary school system and be taught saliently in substance. But I’m grateful.

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.

For a pleasure-seeking species we’re doing remarkably little to create and share pleasure. Our cities, even magnificent ones, are architected as if to drive pleasure out of our waking minds and to confine it to risky, marginalized zones. People who seek sexual pleasure are ridiculed or feared. Those who take pleasure directly through drugs are pitied and the activity is proscribed. Faced with a pleasure-giving technology such as drugs or porn, we ignore it or try to regulate it away, rather than try to improve it and take out the risks as we do with all our other technologies.

We have a “stop at zero” attitude to pleasure. The opposite of pleasure is discomfort, and we’re good at recognizing when people fall there and helping them back out of it. Our homes, foods, and many other things are set up to mitigate discomfort. Medicine is quick to address discomfort with care or drugs. But the acceptable limit is to bring the person back to a state of neutrality. If anyone wants to rise further, into pleasure, they’re labeled an abuser and quickly stopped, or left to fend for themselves.

Empathy
Empathy is caring for other people. When they’re happy you feel good for them. When they’re poorly you feel their pain. We’re physically wired for empathy, just as we are for pleasure. There are specific neurons in our brains that fire according to experiences that we observe others having. What’s socially constructed is to what extent we value or inhibit this natural sense.

We evolved in small bands of people who felt empathy towards each other. Our ancestors also felt empathy towards the people in competing bands and, in order to overcome this and be able to kill them, invented empathy suppression techiques such as military discipline or distancing themselves using face paint or masks. In modern times, our approach to empathy is a mess. We’re not sure if we should feel empathy towards our kin and neighbors, or towards all people. We’re faced with random appeals to empathy towards some distant victims of disaster, while distancing ourselves from ordinary misery on our doorstep. Most of us can’t balance empathy with economic competition.

As with pleasure, we have a “stop at zero” attitude to empathy. When people are miserable we feel for them, if we do, but when they’re elated we don’t share their happiness. At best, we extend positive empathy only to our kids. This makes us tired of empathy as a whole. It’s always about sharing in misery or bad news and never a positive celebration of human existence.

Importance
Importance is knowing that we matter to someone. It’s the feeling that we’re useful in the world, and that other people care about us. Unlike empathy, importance is socially constructed. We’re important because of our social relationships. It’s down to what we do for others, and what we share with them.

In the modern world we struggle to find our importance. Social networks based on proximity, such as the village, the extended family, or even the workplace, are dismantled. Now we have to find our audience and earn our importance with people all over the world. Artists and innovators have the fortune to do that through their work. Some people are committed enough to volunteer or fight for something important. The rest of us have to do it through blogging, opening up our life, or authoring some useful fragment of the information commons. We rarely meet the people that we’re important to.

The only assured way to earn importance with someone, albeit briefly, is to have kids. Our kids are specially connected to us. For all other relationships everyone can reach everyone else, so we give each other formidable competition. As easy as it is to find what you’re after in our connected culture, it’s hard to say something original or important. This matters because if we lose our importance we die. You can go to any old people’s home to see what happens to us when we’re no longer needed.

Autonomy and Purpose
Autonomy is living your life the way you want to live your life. Freedom, if you like, but with the conditions you need to realise it. Being allowed to choose your lifestyle at your own risk is freedom. Having the security and opportunity to achieve it is autonomy. In the West we profess to value autonomy, but usually we see this as limited to the freedom part. A few fortunate people are able to go for it and succeed. Eastern societies allow less freedom, emphasizing empathy instead.

Purpose is having a story about your life. It’s being able to say what you’re about. We crave purpose almost like nothing else. Our desire for purpose is why we’re so captivated by fiction. We want to see the stories of others, and make parallels to our own. Almost all of our fictional stories are stories of redemption. Tragedies are stories of a fall, where redemption is essentially by death. We have a few elating stories of a rise to grace. Most stories are about a journey in both directions, first a fall into danger or evil and then a recovery or redemption.

When we lived in small groups we each had stories that were straightforward and unique within a generation of the group. Now we’re bombarded with the stories of real life and fiction from the whole planet, while being crushed by an economy that wants compliant efficiency, not our individual stories. Our life stories are either stories of a journey, or stories of construction. People whom we call interesting have stories of a journey. They’ve had experiences or been through things. The majority have stories of constructions. We’ve invested in something, which grew bigger and better. Most people try to live these stories through their work, their volunteering, or their kids.

For an individualist society, autonomy is the “below zero” part of purpose. You have to be able to live your own life before you can have your story. In other societies that is not so. You can make your story part of a story that is shared, and thus transcedental. Religions and nations are archaic forms of shared, transcendental stories, and they’re ill suited to our global future. We need better shared stories for humanity. Our great story of today, the economy, is uninspiring. It needs to be broken up into smaller stories, or be a global story about quality of life, rather than wealth.

Flow and Mastery
Flow is to be fully engaged in something just inside the limits of your ability. You are challenged, and the risk of failure is real, but you succeed and grow in the process. Flow seems to give a physical level of satisfaction. In a positive setting this is experienced in sports and the performing arts. It can also drive the single minded pursuit of money, or a military win. Mastery is being accomplished at something, preferably something that other people value or at least respect. Flow is active, while mastery is a state that you attain.

Flow and mastery are rare today. Mostly, our jobs are well within our abilities and they’re very static compared to the length of our working lives. Only a few people such as artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or innovators get to experience them. Because of this craving, we see people engage in hobbies, volunteer craftsmanship, or games. These provide opportunities for Flow and mastery that regular work too often denies. As motivators, flow and mastery are cheap. They’re the natural desire to do great work. We need to have an economy that is more varied, so that each person can find their own niche to be a master of.

Dominance
Dominance is the human drive that most strongly shapes the world today. We, especially men, seek power over others. We climb hierarchies. We accumulate wealth, which is nothing but a relative measure of our reserves of power over other people. We don’t see security in equality, institutions, or a social contract. We see it in power. In other words, we bet that when things get bad, we’d better have the upper hand. We acknowledge that age will make us unimportant, and cling to power as a substitute. We have kids. That’s not to dominate our kids but so that our kids can go forth and dominate others on our behalf.

We compete. The business climate, especially in the US, is based on dominance. Microsoft didn’t go for being profitable, for merely having satisfied customers and higher earnings than expenses. It went for the win. Corporations see the world as a place where there’s room for only a few winners, and grow aggressively to be in the winning positions. The drive to do lead such a corporation is not a drive for wealth, but a drive for dominance. Bill Gates wasn’t in for the money, after the first billion or so. He was in for the natural drive to win, to dominate the industry. Ordinary engineers are motivated by the hope of having the one great idea that trumps the competition.

Our world is set up in the service of dominance to an unhealthy degree. We neglect pleasure as we strive for dominance. We don’t allow people to be vulnerable. We set aside our empathy, so it won’t get in the way. Instead of solving global problems, we merely fight for a good position in the ensuing misery. We seek dominance for importance and make it our purpose, instead of finding other purposes that are more compatible with others. We put too much creative energy behind it. We act as if we’re addicted to it.

None of this is surprising. We’re the descendants of the dominant, so we’re evolved for it. Maybe there were more pleasure-loving, empathic, or creative people in Europe or Asia, but our dominant ancestors butchered them. We then went to Africa, South Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific. Maybe there were people there who weren’t so coldly focused on dominance, but we killed them or enslaved them, and now the world is shaped by us. Our global Anglo-Saxon culture is the culture that grew out of the near-genocide of the Native Americans. In dispassionate Darwinian terms, the emerging World culture is the dominant breed.

As we face up to the idea that every human being on the planet has a claim to prosperity, and that both the natural and the human resources of the planet are bounded, this legacy is not good for us.

Pavlos’s Thoughts – Episode 1 – The Apple tablet and what they should have built instead

Talking post (podcast). Click to open as MP3.

Contents:

• I’m not going to buy one. It’s a passive thing for consuming media. I want a creative device, so it has to have a keyboard.
• Palm had the right idea with the Foleo. They never made it, and it was a bit ahead of its time, but it was the right product concept.
• As for Apple, what they should have built is a Mac with two screens. One on the outside of the lid to use as a tablet, one on the inside to use as a laptop.

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.

The ideas are active and have a dynamic relationship with each other. Ideas have their friends and enemies, like different plants fit well or fight each other. Examples of ideas that are positively linked are a love for power, a hard notion of justice, a strict father, and a conservative outlook. Another cluster may be pleasure-seeking, personal freedom, a forgiving social environment, and a relaxed and open attitude to others. These two clusters are in conflict, but you have many such conflicting clusters in your head.

The ideas that are already active in your mind intercept ones that try to enter from outside and either welcome or fight them, much like the current flora of a garden affects what else might succesfully take root in there. If you have mystical or religious ideas about the world, you may welcome scientologists or horoscopes. If you believe in the socio-economic status quo you’ll reject a deep critique, but if you have in mind examples where it breaks down you’ll hear alternatives.

Rational argument matters relatively little compared to the web of ideas that you already have and the way an incoming idea relates to them. If you are religious, a logical argument about evolution will only face enemies. A secular idea may succeed if it doesn’t fight the religious camp too hard and if it finds some friends. For example if there are humanist or rationalists clusters elsewhere in your head, an idea like evolution may join them and eventually these clusters may overpower the religious or mystical ones. Conversely, you may be converted to religion if the mystical web of ideas grows stronger in your mind through exposure, hardship, or simply because it serves you better.

These are relative fights between webs of ideas. If you have ideas that are coupled to ideas of convincing or influencing, they might cause you to write or speak whole clusters of ideas into the minds of others. There they might bond with friendly ideas and get stronger, and they may fight opposed ideas with more or less success. Rationalism is only as good as the rationalism that can be found in the other mind as common grounds, and appeals to some absolute and essential rationalism are missing the point. It’s not you who is doing the influencing or the convincing either. It’s some of your ideas.

Some ideas create concepts of self. In the West we have a very unitary idea of self, which thinks one thing, believes there is one right way to act, tries to rationalise its emotions, and judges others as if they were self-consistent. We project this in our single-minded god Yahveh, as much as in our sometimes blinkered scientific reductionism. Our movie characters are either angels or demons. Oriental people seem to have a softer, more pluralist mind where different models of reality co-exist and people as well as imaginary beings more fully reflect the society of ideas inside them.

Our concept of self is usually transcedental. We are not transcedental, we die, but we think most of the time as if we’re immortal. We accumulate properety with little regard to enjoying it in our finite lives, and we’ve invented the concept of inheritance to disguise that stupidity. We think of life as a construction rather than a journey. Artists or other extraordinary people who live short but intense lives are usually pitied. Some people try to imagine that they transcend death through their kids. There is no self to die or be immortal. There is only your genes and your memes, which live on, separately.

You are not happy or unhappy, or rather that’s not a useful description because the self is not a major player in it. You experience various physical things, mostly unconsciously, as your mood. The ideas in your mind, and the state they’re in, are experienced as emotions. If some of your ideas seek expression and don’t find it you feel frustrated. If they do you feel fulfilled. If you have stong conflicting clusters of ideas you may feel guilt or stress. If some ideas are in danger, like the idea that you should be fit to mate, you can feel very scared. A lot goes on in your mind and you feel all of this at once. Otherwise you feel bored. There’s not much of a “you” in this, except as the sum of sensory experience coupled to the idea of your existence. The self is a counter-productive tool for understanding and improving how you feel.

Morality is another web of ideas. The cornerstone is the idea of moral reciprocity, in other words the expectation that the other is going to treat you well. We think that our friends and ordinary people close to us have it, but we’re prone to suspect that foreighners, strange people, or criminals don’t. If we think the other mind doesn’t contain moral reciprocity we torture and kill, no matter how alive, similar, or cute the other body may be. Please hold dear the idea to fight any suggestion that another mind doesn’t contain moral reciprocity.

Insofar as people do bad things, it’s their ugly ideas taking control, much as a garden may be overrun with weeds. Our methods of punishment attempt to deal with the whole garden, rather than tending to the ideas in it. We kill the person, which amounts to burning the garden, or simply fence it off for several years in jail. We’re then surprised when we take the fence down and the garden hasn’t transformed itelf into a welcoming lawn or neat productive orchard all by itself.

We need to learn to confront individual neegative ideas rather than the garden/mind/vehicle and the way to do this is though integration, contact, and openness. That’s uncomfortable for both the mind with the sick ideas and the healing minds, but it’s necessary if we want to save the beautiful ideas that are unlucky enough to share the garden with the weeds. Transgressions should be forgiven quickly, not because they don’t matter but because different ideas grow in a mind and they change. If there is contact, the person in jail five years later is no longer the person who committed the crime. Isolation and censorship lock bad ideas with the good ones and prevent this change.

The sin, which turns the garden of ideas into a sealed plot, is to attack or defend people. There are no people who are good or bad, or who matter. There are only ideas. The people you love harbour many wonderful ideas, one hopes. If not why are you attached to them? Those whom you consider your enemies either harbour negative ideas or, more likely, you and they harbour excessive ideas of competition, and you’re simply in conflict.

To overcome this you must learn not to attack people. Fight the idea and the behaviour, not the person. Argue. Listen. The other person is a garden, just as you are. Spread your positive ideas and hope they will take root in there. This is the easier part to learn.

The harder part to learn is not to defend – yourself or others. There is no you to defend. There are only ideas. You have to be open and support free speech, because otherwise there is no peaceful means for new ideas to enter your mind and fight the ideas you have inside. You are only worth as much as the good ideas inside you, and they can fight much better than your clumsy defenses.

You should not seek privilege or competition for yourself. To do so is to make yourself a walled garden, immune to all that’s good outside. Inter-personal competition, such as for wealth, will make you see others in the same sealed way. That is why so many wealthy and powerful people apparently have so little to add or say to the world. They see themselves as a real estate plot rather than a garden of ideas.

By all means do seek power and a wide reach for your ideas. Be a visionary, a leader, or an artist. Broadcast your best ideas to the world and see the best ones grow. Allow others to take your ideas, improve them, and pass them on, because your ideas are not yours. You are them.

My views on IP are that both copyright and fair use should be stronger. I don’t see a particular reason for copyright to lapse, but I’d like to see fair use expanded to permit parody, fan art, and other kinds of related work. I think it should be fair for anyone to make, for example, South Park episodes or Calvin & Hobbes strips so long as they draw everything themselves and make sure not to pass off their work as the official thing. Such fair use would both enrich culture and allow entrepreneurs to fill gaps in the market that the copyright owner doesn’t fill for whatever reason.

In addition, I see copyright and other IP as business-to-business enforcement tools. It seems alien to me that copyright would be enforced against members of the public, in the same way that it would seem strange and probably wrong for an ordinary person to be accused of securities fraud. If the entertainment industry is using its B2B enforcement tools against the public, essentially its customer base, this only signals desperation and confusion.

While undoubtedly the industry is feeling, or predicting, an impact from file sharing and what have you, I think the industry should look at what copyright owners are doing wrong to be in this position. Ordinary consumers generally agree to pay for stuff that they consume, because they recognize it’s fair to do so and because it’s part of a healthy economic relationship with the supplier. If people aren’t willing to pay for music or films, and instead contrive ways to get them for free, that may be for three reasons:

1. These aren’t real customers. Maybe they are students and don’t have money yet, but they’ll be great customers later. Maybe they want to try the content out, or they just want a clip.
2. There’s something wrong with your pricing. Some group of customers want the content, but they want it cheaper.
3. You’re selling the wrong product, or charging for it the wrong way.

For the first two problems there are well-known approaches, so let’s focus on the third.

The entertainment industry does a combination of things. It invests in content and has artists make it, or supports artists who want to make it. It markets the content, telling people what to buy and focusing what would otherwise be a much wider and more chaotic set of entertainment tastes. It then tries to collect revenue by selling the content wholesale to TV (however long that lasts), selling tickets to screenings, and putting the content on media and selling copies. For the most part, consumers enjoy the funded productions as well as the marketing activities of the entertainment firms, but they really dislike buying their own personal copies of media. Consumers always hated these. Since the 1970s, which is as far back as I remember anything, the point of getting hold of an album or a recorded video was to share it.

The entertainment industry has to adapt to that. As a first step it has to stop treating its customer base openly as petty criminals.

Beyond that, the industry has to find different ways of monetizing the assets. I’d enjoy going to the cinema if it didn’t smell of sugar and popcorn, if it was free of advertising (because then I feel I’m being double-charged), and yes if the stern copyright warning were gone. Instead of obsessing over camcorders, the industry could try to sell me a movie experience that I’d enjoy. Bars and coffee shops manage to do that around content that I could buy cheaper at the supermarket, so I’m sure it’s possible. The studios try to make the movie experience very slightly immersive with posters. Technology has kind of moved on. Why not theme the whole screening experience? It’s a challenge, take it up. How about restructuring the movie so it’s more interactive? After all, parts of it may suck, and I’m not happy to sit down and just watch something for two hours nowadays. If you have the whole asset, give me a way to order it with more sex, more space battles, less buildup, and fewer plot strands (or the opposite).

When it comes to music, I may not aways want a personal high-fidelity copy of a specific collection of around 10 songs. In other words I may not want an album to own. I may not want a 5-minute song either. Sometimes I do, but other times I just want to listen to music that I like. Good radio DJs provide that, and the recording industry should work with them rather than try to silence them. I may want to learn about music that’s new to me or try listening to everything from some artist. YouTube does that really well, much better than anything the recording industry or even the online retailers have to offer. If I like an artist I generally want to fund their work, and musicians are just people, not multi-million dollar production ventures, so it should be easy to subscribe to the artist in a meaningful way. With music being a relatively lightweight digital asset, more ways of owning and of sharing it should be open. If I own a track I’d like it kept for me on line and easy to access everywhere. If I subscribe, I’d like to subscribe to a vast collection, or some artist’s ongoing output.

Overall, the entertainment industry should be building healthy relationships with its consumers. We have them with the software industry, we get updates, and life is good. The entertainment industry needs to learn and follow.

• 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.

If you prepare your kids to do well in the world, they’ll live in an ugly world. You have to prepare your kids, everyone’s kids, to take it over.

Kids are smart people who lack experience. They’re not simple-minded. If they ask you a question, they mean it. Answer it properly. If it’s complicated, describe the complexity of it. If they ask why, answer the correct causal question. Don’t invent myths as barriers to learning. Do provide myths… as myths.

Risk focused people see success as a bar that they have to reach.

The best example of a risk focused professional is an airline pilot. The pilot has to get the plane and the passengers to the destination airport, safely. That’s a complete success. Nobody is going to thank the pilot for flying further, higher, faster, visiting a new city on the way, or doing acrobatics. Rather, the pilot has to look out for everything that can go wrong during the flight and avoid or recover from that situation. They’re risk focused in the sense that they are constantly looking at risk, or potential failure, and try to avoid it.

Other examples of risk focused people are accountants, business managers of stable organizations, project managers, film producers, civil engineers, security and military officers, criminals, surgeons, mountaineers, and unfortunately many parents.

Achievement focused people assume a baseline level of success and strive to maximize value from there.

The purest achievement focused person is an artist. Every artist, once competent, will succeed in applying paint to canvas, delivering a song, or remembering their lines. Artists are not concerned with reaching this baseline but with how far they can go from there. Is it new? Is it inspiring? Is the audience ecstatic? Can it be better? Can the work or the artist push new boundaries? Artists are always focused on achievement, and by definition this focus always has to be ahead of what they can at any time reach.

Other examples of achievement focused roles are entrepreneurs, other growth-oriented managers, scientists, product managers, film directors, architects, most doctors, misfits and agitators, athletes, and all kids.

It’s not helpful to label achievement focused people as risk takers and risk focused people as risk averse. In risk focused eyes, an entrepreneur who takes on some big idea is at risk of failing. That same startup CEO might think that the pilot who flies them to a meeting takes on an impossibly greater risk. A better description is that achievement focused people set up their projects to limit or externalize risk in the first place. If a startup fails or a movie flops, the investment is lost but nobody dies. Risk focused people are good at taking on unavoidable risk, managing it during their project, and discharging it safely. Once an airline crew takes off or a surgical team opens a person they enter a period of elevated risk that they have to control and back out of once the task is done.

When you’re running or are otherwise a stakeholder in a project you’ll encounter some combination of these two personality types in different roles. The project itself will also have an orientation, in other words it’s being run as an achievement focused or a risk focused project, either because that’s the personality of the leader or because it’s the culture of the organization.

It’s important to recognize all of these and map them out, to avoid friction between people who misunderstand this difference of focus and to know what you’re getting into or what to expect from others. I’m achievement focused and run projects that way whenever the organization allows it. I once tried to enlist two of our best software engineers for my new project. One, who was achievement focused, eagerly joined and performed better than anyone else I’ve worked with. The other, equally brilliant, guy declined because he thought my project was too risky, by which he meant that success was not well-defined. He was clearly risk focused. Failing to see these differences when you set up teams is likely to lead to tension and disappointment.

That is not to say that teams should only have one personality type, or that one of them is clearly better. If your whole team is achievement focused, maybe you could do with a risk focused project manager to ground you. That’s why films have a producer. If your organization is getting slow you might want to hire an achievement oriented product manager to create something new. If the appointments are good, the friction and stress that these two personality types create in the project are healthy.

There’s a time and a place for each approach. If a mountaineering expedition is not risk focused, they’ll probably lose people. Science has to be achievement focused, but may require large risk focused projects to build accelerators or spacecraft. Startups are created by achievement focused people, but blue-chip companies are run by risk focused accountants. When, and whether, to make the transition is crucial. Transitioning to a risk focus merely because the company has grown large is a mistake, as it will by definition limit growth. A massive product introduction, such as a new aircraft or operating system, can be managed with a risk focus but at some point this reaches diminishing returns. The overall initiative to bring such a thing to the market and make it as attractive as possible is achievement focused. On the other hand a great public work such as construction of a new bridge is fundamentally risk focused. It has to stand. Achievement focused architecture is welcome in such projects, but is contained.

Your kids are achievement focused. Remember that’s their achievements, not yours. As a parent you have to keep them safe, and in times of fear or hardship that may make parents risk focused. It’s important to go beyond this and maintain an achievement focus, so that you can show your kids how to have dreams and not to give them up or run out of them.

At one level, his new job is stupidly easy. Obama could be anywhere from a grey centrist-conservative like Bill Clinton all the way to a towering historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, and in any case the world will be delighted. We are all just so happy we got rid of George W. Bush. Just by being elected, Obama has already delivered what the world expected of him, and he has his entire presidency ahead of him to use as an opportunity. That doesn’t happen often.

That’s also the hard bit. The people of the US, but I think the world as a whole, have created an expectation for Obama to be like Lincoln, and not like Clinton. Maybe the public swallowed the media hype, maybe it was genuine naivety, or maybe it was a raising of expectations and a subtle passing of a mandate by mutual consent. My own view is that Obama presented himself and came through the system like Clinton, a trendy but safe figure acceptable to the business world, and somewhere along the way became pushed by the public to rise up and be like Lincoln. Getting to that position is another rare event. I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see a Lincoln, or even a Castro or a Gorbachev, but I like everyone else have high hopes.

Much is made of Mr Obama being the first black president in a white-dominated country, or more generally a member of a disadvantaged minority who became head of a powerful state. But the honors for these distinctions go to Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher, if we stick to western democracies. If it wasn’t Obama it would probably have been Hilary Clinton. Overall, I don’t think that whatever underdog status Mr Obama might have qualified for matters much.

There is. however, something of substance in Barack Obama’s name and skin tone, and that is the issue of nationalism. America pretends to be a nation-state. It takes a lot of effort to maintain the pretense, and any time you go there you can see it in the flags, the heroes in the movies, the facade of public institutions, and so on. What is this American nation? Well it’s not the native Spanish or Chinese speakers, or the descendants of slaves or indigenous people bearing the remains of their cultural traditions. The made-up American Nation is a branch of the Anglo-Saxon nation, and everyone who passes as that. It’s easy to pass if your ancestors were white European, not so easy otherwise. In other words, America experiences rampant nationalism in the guise of racism. Black Americans aren’t perceived as deficient, they’re just perceived as foreign.

Barack Obama doesn’t look or sound Anglo-Saxon, and that can turn out as a good thing. Here is his second historical opportunity. If he excels at passing as Anglo-Saxon, the opportunity is wasted. It just shows that with great effort a few individuals can be admitted into the intolerant, obsolete, made up American nation. If instead Barack Obama makes no effort to reflect Anglo-Saxon values but promotes an international outlook, a secular state, multi-cultural education, and a sane migration policy, the opportunity to move America out of its 19th century nationalist yearnings and into a post-nationalist 21st century will be in part realized.

So cheers, Mr Obama, and best of luck!

Myth 1: Privatisation makes things efficient
Good management, consolidation, low corruption, and a strong drive to work (whether spontaneous or coercive), make things efficient. These factors may be present in private enterprises or state-managed ones (including science, military, transport, or healthcare). The converse problems may also plague both private and state enterprises.

The only parameters where there is an identifiable difference is corruption. Capitalism institutionalises the self-interest of managers and owners as a controlled (mostly) inefficiency called profit, whereas the same motives in public institutions result in unofficial profiteering called corruption. It’s debatable which kind of inefficiency is worst.

However, efficiency is an academic point or a red herring. The main purpose of privatisation is to increase the value of money, by allowing wealthy individuals to buy high-quality services without having to subsidise similar, or indeed any, services for the majority. Education, transport, and healthcare are the most common examples. Once private services are established, political pressure from the rich to scale down and gradually abandon the public systems is inevitable, and usually results in a two-tier system. Maybe this is “efficient” in the sense that the system only has to provide good services to a few people.

A second purpose of privatisation is to increase the value of capital by replacing nominally efficient (non-profit), in practice somewhat corrupt enterprises with officially exploitative (profit-oriented) ones. This process thus expands the scope of capitalism to the detriment of consumers. In developed countries the rich feel they can tolerate this cost as consumers, and in poor countries it’s not their problem.

Myth 2: Central planning is bunk
Central planning is extremely popular and prevalent in Capitalism, due to its straightforwardly obvious benefits. All corporations are hierarchically organised and centrally planned. So are state economies and the economic strategies of the major blocks (US, EU, Japan). Groups of companies operating in the same industrial sector generally meet to plan things like standardisation or new technology. International institutions of capital, such as the WTO and the IMF, are hierarchical and centrally planned. Planning, not competitive decision-making, is the defining trait of modern economic development.

What is bunk is a particular, hopeless form of planning that attempted to centralise all layers of decision-making and micro-manage the economy remotely. Soviet and Chinese Communism were structured that way, presumably due to a mixture of technical naivety, issues of geographical control, and entrenched corruption. These systems failed their populations in ways more important than poor economic performance, and the latter was due to factors besides poor planning, but somehow central planning is singled out by Capitalists as the defining flaw of Communism.

As far as I can see, the argument against “central planning” emerges whenever anyone proposes a policy of regulating or socialising some economic activity. Central planning of, for example, capital investment, infrastructure, R&D, banking, energy, or a host of other large scale activities in a way that benefits industry does not appear to be a problem.

Myth 3: Market forces allocate resources optimally
A market can, under ideal and stable conditions, allow a small number of participants to reach an optimal allocation of resources. In any realistically complex scenario the market behaves like a complex system with emergent behaviour, and it’s hard (although sometimes practical) to predict the outcome. Observed outcomes are indeed as variegated, including stable efficient, but also stable coercive, stable inefficient, volatile, depressed, and chaotic market behaviours.

Markets include enormous inefficiencies. A whole class of people is employed promoting substantially equivalent products, trading, and selecting between them. Producers strive to create differentiated and proprietary products, while consumers want commodities and transparency. Volatility in the market brings down technical and financial plans, or incurs huge costs to ensure against them. Natural distrust between parties causes under-buying and overpricing.

Taking a market approach might result in overall efficiency and rationality, or it might not. It depends on a lot of things, like the relative economic strength of the participants, their relative need, the relative efficacy of productive versus destructive forms of competition (e.g. secrecy, advertising), opportunities for speculation, economies of scale, the fluid or discrete nature of a resource, scarce resources such as land or radio frequencies, human and technical factors, and a whole set of poorly understood interactions between those. To insist a-priori that a more market-oriented approach would improve economic results is gospel.

However, there are two things that markets reliably do: They favour the economically stronger party (larger, most entrenched, etc.), causing a feedback loop towards consolidation, and they cause resources and production generally to be repurposed towards the needs of the most wealthy consumers. This is optimal if you are a wealthy consumer working in an entrenched corporation.

Myth 4: There’s such a thing as a market price
An associated falsity is that there is some uniform, commodity price for things like electricity, clothing, or industrial products, and that supply and demand are actually the main forces setting it. In fact, prices easily vary by an order of magnitude across the overall market, which suggests that market distortion is the dominant determining factor and market equilibrium the exception – the latter being confined in small subsets.

The price that a heavy industry pays for energy is an order of magnitude lower than household prices because of bargaining power, taxation policy, and transaction efficiency. Conversely, the price that consumers pay for clothing and manufactured goods is an order of magnitude higher than their cost near the manufacture site, and this is due to purchasing and distribution considerations, not transport. In the case of communications, consumers are charged many times the bulk bit transport cost due to effective collusion between carriers. Some of these factors are legitimate causes of the price disparity, while others are just profiteering. But, the main point is that factors other than supply and demand account for the greater portion of the price that weak buyers (consumers) pay.

Thus an argument that the market regulates consumer prices is bogus. To be more precise, the market does regulate consumer prices but not in the technocratically virtuous supply-and-demand way. Only demand has a significant effect, and essentially consumers are charged what they will bear. A bewildering variety of tactics is in place to sustain this, such as lock-in schemes, collusion, tiered providers, product ranges, and advertising, all justified by the insincere claim that the resulting prices are “market driven”.

As an aside, one wonders if supply and demand could, even in principle, regulate the use of commodities such as energy, communications, or water. The needs of industry are so disparate in magnitude from those of consumers that an efficient uniform market would end up charging consumers too little (encouraging waste) or industry too much (blocking productivity). Only taking consumers into account, their income varies so dramatically that any given price for electricity, for example, would cause hardship to some and encourage waste for others.

Myth 5: Free trade is fair trade
Free trade is fair in exactly the same sense as competitive sport is. No outside help, no violence to destroy opponents, and competition according to an arbitrary set of rules. If you feel that competition is some intrinsically good thing to be rewarded, or you feel that it’s fair for the strongest party to reap the greatest benefits, then free trade is fair for you. If you feel that other considerations, such as equitable gains or social policy, should determine outcomes, then free trade is not fair at all. It’s as fair as distributing food according to who can run the fastest and carry the most loaves of bread.

When two parties of vastly unequal power interact, the expected outcome is for the stronger one to abuse the weaker. The orthodox solution is to install barriers blocking interactions along the axis of power imbalance, but permit interactions along other axes where the parties are more equal. Free trade is inconsistent in this respect: It blocks some outside influences, but permits the most free interaction on the economic axis, exactly where parties are most unequal. Economically, it’s survival of the fittest. In that respect it’s hard to see it as anything but a transparent demand from western capitalists to set up the mechanics of a system where they can use established advantage to grab wealth.

Proponents might argue that economic imbalance is not a problem, because a huge corporation and a startup company can, and do, trade to mutual benefit. But economic size is the wrong determinant of equality. The correct one is need to trade. A corporation has a profit need to trade, while a worker has a survival need to sell, and a person buying necessities has a survival need to buy. This profit-survival imbalance is what allows the party with the weaker need (profit) to dominate the one with the acute need (survival). The key point is that, for the latter party, trade is no longer a fair economic game, as they are subject to de-facto coercion based on their circumstances.

A further and much more sinister problem is that free trade has enormous externalities (costs on others than the direct participants). Trade between A and B affects trade between B and C, and essentially places A and C in competition. The power imbalance between A and C may be huge, causing serious harm. For example, if A is a western food buyer, B is a third-world farmer, and C is a third-world labourer, A can buy all of B’s agricultural capacity, leaving C to starve. It’s hard to think of a solution to this problem other than socially motivated barriers to trade.

Myth 6: Ethical consumerism works
So if free trade is so bad, how about engaging in ethical trade, such as buying Fairtrade goods, boycotting sweatshops, and the like. Voting with your money, and it makes you feel good inside too. Well, actually these are the problems. While undoubtedly a worthy effort and a way to make a real (if modest) difference, ethical consumerism is a lousy political concept.

In a market, consumers are in competition with each other to find the cheapest and most valuable goods. Ethical consumerism burdens the most ethical minority with the higher costs of equitable trade, while rewarding the cynical majority with relatively cheaper (non-fair) produce. Worse, it fails to compel the majority to change their ways, and in fact works to absolve the status quo. If you are concerned about the third world, conservatives all too happily say, buy Fairtrade. Your problem, your solution. Discussion closed.

This concept that the class who care about a social problem should unilaterally bear the cost of fixing it is insidious and repugnant. It is aired in many situations where a group calls for the abolition of a privilege: Don’t like it? Go on, abolish your own, conservatives say in a smug tone. Well that is bullshit. What we need is not fashionable opting out of exploitation for the few, but binding rules that prevent exploitation for everyone.

Myth 7: Productivity is good
All other things being equal, productivity is of course good. It creates prosperity and goodness all around, and avoids waste. The trouble is that standard arguments about productivity are rarely about the technical meaning (efficient production) and usually about the political one (a priority on output over labour welfare). Even when technical optimality is involved, it usually comes hand in hand with labour compromises.

Well duh! Productivity is great if you’re a consumer. A plethora of goods and services is available to you at low prices. If you’re the one who has to be “productive” you have to work long hours doing unfulfilling work, with low security and damaging your long term welfare such as your health or personal life. Obviously there is an adversarial relationship here, and declaring that either productivity or labour rights are sacrosanct is a rather unproductive stance. I don’t know what is the correct balance, and the issue is very complex, but simply focusing on one side perpetuates myths.

A major source of complexity is that this is a three-party adversarial relationship, the third one being profit. So we can maximise the availability of goods and services at low prices, or profit, or labour welfare. Arguments abut productivity are often dishonestly posed as goods/labour tradeoffs, while in fact they are profit/labour tradeoffs, the degree to which the consumer is screwed in the process being roughly a constant in each of the large consumer economies.

Since markets favour the more consolidated party, and that is profit, it follows that both labour and consumer standards would function much more effectively (or indeed at all) if they are coercively enforced. The stock argument against this is that such enforcement is impossible, because pro-labour measures would drop productivity and capital would flee, and at the same time unnecessary because westerners are insulated from third-world conditions. Losses of jobs or labour standards are presented as mysterious and freak events, rather than the natural payback for buying sweatshop goods at high prices. Only the crushing scale of the problem keeps westerners’ minds in such comfort thinking.

Myth 8: Migration is export of labour
Migration is, indeed, a way to export labour from exodus to settlement countries, but this is not the essence of migration. Most trading activities export labour, while the most efficient ways to do so are outsourcing and setting up of cheap-labour factories as practised by major corporations. These activities are little more than massive schemes for extracting labour, as a resource, from where it is cheap and transferring it to richer economies. They export labour in the same way that mines export ore.

What is pertinent about migration is that, unlike other methods of exporting labour, it also exports agency and political demands. The workers who settle in the west are sometimes able to save and invest in the local economy, buying some part of it like a house. They’re also able to extract ethical or political sympathy, and so affect small changes to the society to improve their conditions. That is the special thing that gets everyone worked up about migration. Export of labour is commonplace.

Everyone in rich countries loves immigration, including rabid conservatives. This is because immigrants come to offer diligent labour at cut rates, and everyone likes consuming that, especially rabid conservatives. The argument is under what conditions the immigrants arrive and stay. Progressives would like immigrants to enjoy the benefits of natives because they feel the immigrants are just as nice people as themselves and often more interesting. Rabid conservatives want them to arrive but stay subservient and invisible, because they recognise that immigrants are nicer people than themselves and also more interesting.

Myth 9: Investment is good for you
Investment gets some entirely undeserved good press. It’s hailed as an engine of development, a saviour of economies, what the poor world desperately needs, etc. This is only very marginally true. It can happen, but very little investment is like that. The word investment has the quaint, intuitive meaning of “Allowing someone to use your productive resources in exchange for a share of the proceeds” and the accepted business meaning of “Buying the future profit-making capacity of economic resources”.

Present-day investment is almost none of the former and almost all of the latter, also called speculative investment. For reasons that are not entirely clear but include technical ignorance on the part of investors, economic instability caused by speculation itself, over-capacity, and straightforward greed, investment very rarely means spending significant resources to build something productive. When this does happen, it tends to be jealously guarded within the investing entity. So-called outward investment usually means bulk-buying some limited economic good (oil, a logo, airtime, intellectual property, real estate) and then selling it piecemeal at higher prices. Crucially, the price differential, and hence the profit, results purely from the scarcity created by the “investors”, and not from any increase in productive capacity due to them.

It’s thus very disheartening to hear claims that some entity like Africa “needs investment”. To be sure, it needs an infusion of productive capacity, and conditions that foster production. However what it gets is various forms of bulk buying its resources: The typical one is setting up factories, which are simply facilities to extract labour resources at bulk prices, while leaving no residual good in the economy. Investment on oil, mining, and other natural resources is similarly just a bulk buying scheme. Investment in utilities such as communications and power is bulk buying the ability to extract fees for these services.

It’s hard to see anything good about that, and in fact it’s rare to find conditions where investment is good, in the long term, for the party receiving it. The only such cases are where investment has a strategic or ethical character (for example the government investing in a poor region to develop it) or when the receiving party gets a large measure of ownership in exchange for their skills, labour, or resources (as with high-tech venture capital).

Myth 10: It’s how you earn it that matters
While it’s true that earning tends to happen at the sharp edge of wealth, the whole picture is important. How the money is invested and how it is spent are almost as important moral considerations, and currently they seem to escape criticism.

Money is power. Like most powers, having the power is a power, and causes real effects without consuming any of it. Investment blesses certain recipients, while stranding others. It causes inflation of assets such as housing. It causes politicians to listen to the investing class. It creates a mercenary and deeply amoral attitude in corporations, which seek to maximise shareholder returns. It causes a general rise in conservatism as entities compete to appear more stable investment targets. Capital flight destroys the conventional, and therefore the real, value of assets, to the point of bringing down national economies. And the striking thing is that money does all this without a penny being spent, or earned necessarily. Merely the holding and placing of money like casino bets is an act of intense moral content.

Spending money is, of course, even more of a moral activity. Charity and political campaigning are obvious examples but so is consumption in general. Where and on what the money is spent makes the difference between waste and charity. If you spend a thousand dollars buying fuel for your vehicle you are mostly causing waste. If you spend the same amount on performance art or education, you’re probably subsidising worthy activities. But then if you spend it on an army of menial labourers you’re maintaining servility. If you buy luxuries you’re creating an elitist market, but if you buy any old crap you lower consumer standards.

The ethics of spending is an extremely complicated issue, largely hand-waved at by economics. Generally speaking, you should try to make your money go to people who need it, who do some socially useful work, and who will retain a surplus from what you pay them. Figuring this out may be too complex to practice, but the idea that spending is morally a discretionary activity is a myth.

Myth 11: The stock market generates value
Productive investment generates value. To be more precise, productive work does, and productive investment graciously allows it to happen rather than holding the necessary resources hostage. Although productive investment occasionally registers a blip on capital markets, the rule is speculative investment. The latter just buys the future right to extract a levy on productive activity, and generates no value whatsoever.

All this is not fuzzy political talk. Productive and speculative investment are distinct financial actions. When a company raises funds through private investment, floatation, or issuing stock, the money goes to the company and funds its productive resources such as machinery, staff, and the like. When shareholders trade shares with each other, zero money from the transaction goes to fund anything productive, or reaches the company at all. There is some marginal and questionable value in the transaction as a guide to management, but otherwise it’s money changing hands between two unproductive third parties. Nothing in the structure of the stock market favours the productive kind of investment.

Shareholding is a means to impose a levy on productive activity (through dividends), and the stock market is a place to bulk buy and trade the future right to do this. It is in fact just like taxation, but private. Unsurprisingly, shareholding is presented by government as a magical engine of wealth creation that will fund otherwise unsustainable spending, like pensions. It isn’t. It’s like taxation, but private. You buy the right to impose taxes, if you can.

Myth 12: Capital just accumulates
If you despair at the thought that capital simply accumulates, and there is nothing to stop its natural consolidation – or even if you think that that affords a certain natural right to capital – the good news is that too is a myth.

Capital does accumulate and propel itself in a positive feedback loop, but only under ideally stable conditions. In the real world, idle capital shrinks through inflation, while invested capital depreciates abruptly through change. Change, technical, social, political, or behavioural, is the strongest tool of the reformist in fighting the consolidation of capital.

In order to escape slow attrition through inflation, capital has to be invested, however nominally and multiply removed, in productive activities. If capitalists could identify those once and for all, there would be nothing but consolidation and an ever increasing gap between capitalists and workers. Fortunately, old productive activities become obsolete, forcing the capital invested there to evacuate or lose its value, while new activities gain productive value, causing capital to compete for a place there. In this process, Capital has to be understood as some kind of bulky liquid that has to be accommodated in investment vessels lest it evaporate or stagnate.

This constant decanting of capital inevitably causes losses, from the point of view of the entrenched capitalist. Sometimes the losses go to complete waste, in failed projects, conversion costs and the like. More interestingly, capital has to go from the largest holders to those who had less or none, as the former try to acquire new technologies, pay for professional services, etc. This is a reformist effect, ambivalent of course but at least capable of generating hope.

The result that is easy to predict is an erosion of consolidated capital. What happens at the other end, with the portion of capital that has moved, is more subtle. The capital could be diffused to a wider group of workers and small capitalists whose prosperity is modestly raised, and that is a positive, if reformist step towards equality. Alternatively, the capital could go to smaller capitalists who succeed in capturing the new means of production so thoroughly that they become large capitalists – a disaster for equality.

The moral is clear: If you’re a professional, a worker, or a supplier approached by capital that’s on the move, looking for a new place to establish itself, name the highest feasible price. It’s your chance, and your duty.

Developing software is most like painting a picture.

You start with a vague idea of what you want to accomplish and roughly how to begin. But your mind’s eye can’t really see the whole picture with any accuracy of form, or the details of the picture with any precision. Thus the picture emerges as you paint. At each point during the work, what is already on the canvas lets you anchor your imagination and see a little bit further. As you try to paint this you encounter an imperfection or an aspect of reality, and have to adjust, until you have converged, by this cycle of imagination and recording, onto a picture that is whole enough.

If you look for a more methodical approach, you may find yourself receiving the advice of professional illustrators or graphic designers, because they are the ones with technical advice to give. They will generally suggest you “design” your painting and imply with this a regime where you can define the salient features and hand over, as it were, the completion to unskilled apprentices. It will be surprising if this yields any great work. There is in fact a form of design you can apply, but it’s different. It is to prototype the whole or the details of the painting, possibly in a more casual medium, until you have clarity in your mind about what you should do. Then you execute the real painting over the most basic pencil design. You do, however, put down the forms in a certain temporal order that you have learnt works.

Now, your customer, if you have one, will tend to have an opinion about what you paint. You can reach a clear enough agreement about what sort of thing you should paint, like a nude, or a still life, or a portrait, and a fabulously precise agreement about the base technologies you should use (oils, canvas, dimensions). The customer may even try to specify some gross stylistic aspects of the work, like it should be Impressionist, or avoid large patches of green. The thing is, all this agreement will do little to ensure the customer is pleased. The customer will generally be pleased if they like your work and not otherwise. So, gradually, what you sell becomes your reputation rather than any one painting.

You will paint the same painting several times. Your customers will not see it that way of course (they each get a unique work) and at the same time they will (I want a painting like his, but better). There is nothing wrong or even particularly boring with this. You will want to paint the same kind of thing again but do your mistakes right, or at least differently. Each time the parts you’ve executed before will be trivially easy, and you’ll learn something over the difficult and new parts. When you stop learning, it’s time to end the series and start something fresh.

Your manager, if you have one of these, will expect you to produce the painting by filling the canvas at a regular rate, like left to right and top to bottom, as if you were a mechanical printer. They will find this thought appealing because it lets them measure the filled and unfilled portion of the canvas and calculate whether progress is according to schedule. Your manager will generally express dismay when you report that 98% of the canvas is filled, but none of the main features of the painting are really in place, and anyway you need to redo the background because it just doesn’t hang together. You will argue vainly with your manager that a good painting is released when it’s ready.

At first, nobody will like your paintings. They will indeed be awful, but even after this stage nobody will like your good paintings for a while. Then a few people will believe in your paintings and declare to others that they are good. Suddenly (if you’re lucky) lots of people you didn’t expect will start wanting your paintings, but many of them will make remarks that indicate they like them for misunderstood or superficial reasons, and that will be kind of tiresome. Anyway, your paintings will soon become dated and forgotten, unless you’re one of the lucky few and they become cultural artefacts.

As a genaralisation, here are some thoughts on how to write a game
people will play.

• Don’t offer a ‘canned’ reward, like pretty graphics that you only see when you win. If possible don’t offer a winning condition at all.
• Don’t ask the player to go through a long and tedious sequence of actions ad infinitum until they get it absolutely right.
• Do give the impression that the player is accumulating something of value in the virual world of the game (experience, health, armor, spells, guns, rank, territory…)
• Do encourage fantasy. All games except the abstract ones (Tetris) have a strong escapist element. Think of an escapist setting (dragons, space, racing), then hire a good artist to paint the graphics and a good writer to write the text. Make the player want to imagine being in the game. This is where the reward from seeing deeper into the game world is derived. Only add amazing graphics and sound if they enhance the realism of this fantasy.
• Do be fair, if what you build is fundamentally a test of skill. Make sure the action is responsive and precise. Generate events randomly, so that problems have to be solved and not rehearsed, but without gross variation of difficulty. People play such games to test themselves, possibly against others. They will go on forever to correct their mistakes but not if the imperfections of the program deny them this reward.
• Do present challenges that engage people’s natural skills. Fast spatial reasoning, driving, aiming, assesing risk and forming strategies are examples. Doing mental arithmetic, remembering trivia and repeating sequences of key presses are counterexamples.
• Do encourage interaction between human players. Create a culture. Create hype. Have people debate the realative merits oh HA vs SD weapons over the internet. Make sure they hear of all the different theories on where to build your missile turrets. Tell them about the secret passage by the door on the left. People do almost everything for people in life. If they can’t compete head on, let them talk about it. This is by far the most important rule.
• Finally, do be nice to the player. It’s one thing making an addictive game and another a game that people like to play. People will keep playing your game if they are treated with respect. They might still play it but will hate doing it if it’s just long, slow, and addictive.