John McCone : Philosophy For The Future

Philosophy For The Future

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Is There An Ultimate Purpose Of Life?

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Ultimate Purpose to Life
John Christian Fjellestad/Shutterstock.com

For many, the question: “What is the ultimate purpose of life?” may seem futile, even trite, when so many immediate and pressing issues abound, yet we must at least account for why some ponder this great question so intensely. This question is important because, while we devote most of our energy to our immediate daily concerns, many believe that the ultimate reason to put such effort into living is to do or accomplish something. Others make huge daily sacrifices to rear children who can accomplish something important…but what? If there is no ultimate purpose of life, how can any accomplishment have significance?

The question – Is there an ultimate purpose of life? – seems so straightforward. Yet it exposes the very limits of scientific inquiry – our civilization’s crowning achievement. This question is not scientifically tractable. Scientific inquiry can do a lot:  sensibly answer queries about facts (Do antelopes lay eggs? Do crocodiles eat fish?); answer “why” type questions (Why is the sky blue?) in the context of hypothesized models supported by evidence (because air scatters short wavelengths more than long ones) and determine instrumentally effective options for accomplishing a given desired outcome. (How can I make soap? Answer: by mixing sodium hydroxide with animal fat).

But science cannot tell us what we should want, or what we should do. So we set about life with various purposes in mind which we then try to accomplish. But no amount of scientific investigation can tell us whether these purposes are right or wrong. While we may choose to adopt some life purpose, no methods exist to ascertain whether it is a purposeful purposes, or a pointless purpose. Perhaps we can never know whether we are truly doing something meaningful with our lives – or just wasting time.

And yet, despite these difficulties, many strive to answer this question. Why? The main reason is because the brain’s job is to do things. We wouldn’t have evolved a brain, that consumes half our body’s glucose, if it didn’t do anything. Our brain must also work out what not to do – such as actions that might bring death or injury.

So the question: “What is the ultimate purpose of life?” strikes the core of our mind’s primary reason for being. Namely, to continuously answer that deceptively simple-sounding question: “What should I do now?” And to do it.

Abstract questions on the ultimate purpose of life have disturbingly practical implications. Why punish children “for their own good” if there is no absolute good? What purpose, for example, could disciplining children serve if there is no ultimate purpose? Presumably, when we put effort into rearing children, we are trying to get them to turn out one way rather than another. Why put any effort into child-rearing if all maturity outcomes are equivalently pointless?

Many seek the ultimate purpose of life in the hope of gaining meaningful fulfillment. Perhaps if we knew what the point of our life was we would feel whole, could sally forth, fulfill our destiny, and live life with high spirits and high morale. Perhaps that is the purpose of seeking the ultimate purpose.

And yet… if we seek an ultimate purpose of life in order to attain a sense of meaningful fulfillment and completion, then clearly not all purposes are equal. What if we discovered that the ultimate purpose of life was to sit alone in a dank cave fishing worms out of bat excrement while drinking our own urine? Would that bring fulfillment, comfort or joy? Furthermore, if you knew that an honest inquiry into the ultimate purpose of life would lead to this conclusion, would you still inquire, or would you cease your inquiry forthwith …or, perhaps, try to delude yourself into thinking that life’s true purpose was something more enjoyable and comfortable?

This blog article will not reveal the ultimate purpose of life. However, if the reason we seek the ultimate purpose is to find fulfillment, a sense of meaningfulness and contented satisfaction in what we do, then perhaps a more important question is:

“How do we obtain a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment from our actions in life?”

And, indeed, perhaps the main point of raising and educating children in a particular way should be to enable them to gain satisfaction and fulfillment from what they do in later life.

So how can we attain a sense of satisfaction from what we do?

Let’s make it simple:

The ultimate purpose of the brain is to generate action.

To act effectively on a system you must know:

  • The initial conditions of the system
  • The relationship of cause to effect that governs the system
  • The final desired state you want the system to adopt

 

Science deals with 1) and 2)

 

But without an answer to 3) people feel lost and incapable of meaningfully applying their knowledge gleaned from studying 1) and 2).

One answer to 3) is: “Whatever floats your boat.”

Unfortunately, the pursuit of our own personal, somewhat arbitrary objectives can interfere with other people’s incompatible objectives and annoy (even enrage) them.

This is our great dilemma: how to meaningfully pursue our own objectives without treading on the toes of others too much and to help them instead?

Humanity is, at its core, a social species. Our minds balance self-interest with concern for others. When we seek meaning through our actions, we seek this balance: to protect our own well-being while helping others. Actions that achieve both – feel meaningful.

Yet this correct balance is the essence of morality. We cannot categorically state that life’s objective purpose is to live successfully and morally, but a successful and moral life does at least feel both meaningful and satisfying to those who live it. And while it may be impossible to objectively determine the ultimate purpose of life, objectively optimal strategies for balancing different people’s wills do exist ( which The Philosophical Method thoroughly derives) and the norms implied by this optimal strategy form the fundamental basis of morality.

I posit that scientific norms imply further norms concerning how we should live our daily lives in accordance with an optimal social contract.

A society which follows the path of objective morality will thrive and meet the needs of its members, keep conflicts at tolerably low levels, and achieve a sufficiently broad consensus over right and wrong, to ensure righteous people get due recognition.

Once we can live successfully and righteously, properly balancing our needs with others, we will satisfy our need for purpose. Indeed, the one of the primary benefits of reading philosophy is the acquisition of working principles to make good decisions in life and establish good relations with others.

Not because our lives will have an objective, ultimate purpose, but rather because we will realise that life never needed an ultimate purpose in the first place, and that our pursuit of “purpose” was simply the pursuit of a mode of living and action that:

  • Gains the goodwill and respect of others
  • Addresses our own needs and desires
  • Will not doom us in the long run

Our “pursuit of purpose” is simply the pursuit of this optimal mode of living.

Rationality is the optimal coupling of action to intention.

Morality is the optimal coupling of collective action to collective intention.

An irrational person is someone whose intentions are not self-consistent. As he pursues one interest, he undermines another. Without carefully thinking about all his different wants and whether they can consistently be accomplished together, he cannot avoid undermining himself at every turn. This leads to a miserable life.

An immoral society is one where the intentions of each member are inconsistent with the others. In such society, people constantly work to undermine each other. No one’s aspirations are safe. What one person builds and values, others will sabotage and destroy. An immoral society is thus a collectively miserable society.

But those who can live a rational and moral life inside a moral society are fortunate indeed and have no need for any objective purpose beyond this.

So perhaps the answer to the question: “Is there an ultimate purpose of life?”

Is: “Strictly speaking, no, but it doesn’t matter as we can gain satisfaction from seeking an optimal and just life – which we can use reason to identify.”

 

John

 

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Floating Infrastructure For Stable Governance

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Political change can end oppression with long overdue emancipatory reforms, but it can also create oppression. The transition of the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, the Rise of Mao Zedong following the boxer rebellion and the Chinese civil war, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the genocide that followed, or the American PATRIOT act are all examples of changes for the worse.

Even neutral reforms can be disruptive, and leave many elderly people with a sense that the rug was pulled out from under them, while the cost of regulatory change often exceeds the cost of the regulations themselves. Between a third and a quarter of all financial service firms spend one whole day per week tracking and analysing regulatory change. The best regulatory environments for business are politically stable ones with constant rules that make long term future planning, and investment, possible.

In my book, The Philosophy Method, I suggest that, since immigrating into a country requires positive effort, immigrants effectively consent to a host nation’s law more completely than those who stay for family, friends or career. For this reason, a nation with unchanging laws and an initial population of zero would more closely resemble a perfect social contract – a legal system with the full consent of all inhabitants (until they had children) – than any other real world political arrangement. Voluntary migrants into such a country would accept its law in totality at the time of their arrival. Since the laws don’t change, they remain acceptable to old migrants, while the new migrants will also accept them (or else not move there). So a country with unchanging laws and zero initial population will amass, over time, an entire population who all find the law acceptable, perhaps even optimal (if such a thing is possible in the real world).

I called this form of governance “Constitutional Anarchy.” “Anarchy” merely refers to the fact that no one has the authority to make or change the law. There would still be a legal constitution as well as a judiciary and police force to interpret and enforce it. Human beings must, of course, initially write the law, and they could write and modify the law for the territory until the first inhabitant moved in to be ruled by it. However, once the first person moved in, the law would be frozen for ever after.

A major limitation of constitutional anarchy is that the only response to an objectionable law is to leave the country. You may ask incredulously: “But what if a law was a huge problem for 99% of the population? What if the solution was obvious? Would everyone still really have to up sticks and leave?” While people may initially all agree with the laws, changing technology and criminal tactics could suddenly make a given law very problematic. There is something ridiculous about an entire citizenry abandoning buildings, roads, parks, zoos, etc., etc., just because new technology rendered a few (easily fixable) laws ineffective and no amendment procedure existed. The principal absurdity of moving an entire population just to change a law is the billions of pounds worth of fixed infrastructure that would effectively be wasted.

Unamendable laws foster political stability, which has many advantages. The main disadvantage (of the only recourse to dissatisfaction with the law being relocation) is the cost of abandoning fixed infrastructure.

Floating Infrastructure
A graphic representation of a floating city. Picture provided courtesy of the Seasteading Institute

But what if all the country’s infrastructure floated on water? What if the country was only a few miles across and the nation with identical laws in all other respects (except for the problematic law) was located 5 miles away from the first? Given that container ships the size of skyscrapers routinely travel across whole oceans, does it really seem impractical to move a floating city across 5 miles of water to amend a law? There would be a third option: the Seasteading Institute advocates modular floating cities composed of platforms that can be docked to, and undocked from, each other. So, if only some people wanted to change a given law, they could undock their platforms and move 5 miles over to the new jurisdiction while those who were happy with the status quo could stay. This might happen if the existing regulations inadequately met the needs of some new industry in the floating city but continued to serve other industries.

 

Jurisdiction-Independent Courts

 

Example of how the same aquatory could be recycled for new jurisdictions without ever changing the rules in a single inhabited jurisdiction.

The largest barriers to towing a city made of floating infrastructure into a brand new jurisdiction would be negotiating the territory for the jurisdiction with the UN (current international politics takes decades, if not longer, to create new countries), and starting a new court from scratch (since precedence plays a strong role in judgements and court procedures). The best way to address these challenges would be to establish an umbrella nation on the high seas with a single court. This court could:

  • Rapidly create new jurisdictional territories with new constitutions in regions of water within the aquatory of the umbrella nation with arbitrary laws proposed by jurisdictional entrepreneurs
  • Judge cases for multiple jurisdictions in accordance with whatever local laws govern that jurisdiction

While the umbrella nation’s court could establish new jurisdictions on ungoverned territory, it should not be allowed to “rezone” previously zoned jurisdictions until their last inhabitant moves out. This way political stability can be ensured for those who choose to stay put in their jurisdiction of choice.

All the territory (aquatory) of the umbrella nation that was not specifically allocated as a jurisdiction would be subject, by default, to the law of the sea.

Such an umbrella nation would in all likelihood take decades to establish, but, once established, it could serve as a sand box in which to rapidly test a wide variety of different legal and regulatory systems.

We can thus see that, perhaps ironically, the inherent flexibility of a floating medium could make more rigid and more stable governance systems feasible. However, their compactness and variety would ensure that everyone could find a jurisdiction that was right for them.

 

John

 

Do You Have a Burning Desire to Make a Comment?

 

Have you found this article thought provoking? Is there some message you desperately want to communicate to future readers but can’t because my comment section automatically closes 28 days after my posts go live?

If so, you might be interested to know that I reopen any comments section to members of my mailing on request as one of the perks of joining.

If you’d like to leave a comment, simply scroll to the bottom of the page, sign on to my mailing list and them email me with a request to reopen the comments section for this post.

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John

World Urban Population Growth Will Reverse by 2050

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Urbanization is the defining trend of the industrial revolution. Economists triumphantly glorify urbanization, globalization and specialization as the three pillars of human progress and the present global trend is yet more urbanization. A United Nations report, predicting continued urbanization, estimates that, by 2050, 68% of the world’s population will live in cities. Most people (especially economists) believe that urbanization can and should continue.

 

Nevertheless, I believe urbanization will reverse before 2050.

 

 

Why do Cities Exist?

 

Cities exist for the same reason as microchips or brains. By bringing processes closer together, interaction times can be reduced. In pre-industrial times, the city had three main roles:

  • A marketplace
  • A theatre
  • A centre of power

 

Production was a cottage industry, but ancient cities still facilitated distribution. Craftsmen that manufactured tools which farmers only occasionally replaced (perhaps a shovel, or a plough) had to set up shop near large crowds so that the small fraction requiring – say – shovels would suffice to earn them a living.

Ancient cities also hosted performances such as theatre and song. Since poets, or actors, can perform as easily to a large audience as a small one, there are economies of scale to be gained from crowds.

Ancient cities were also power centres. Kings of old employed loyal thugs to go around with weapons threatening peasants and seizing a portion of their harvest as tax. At the very least, a king needed royal guards and messenger boys to raise an army on short notice, and stone masons to maintain fortifications. This entourage of specialized professionals who didn’t farm, was most suitably located somewhere that food and other wealth flowed into such as a town where farmers brought their food to buy goods manufactured by craftsmen and artisans. Cathedrals and bishops were also in cities making them centres of religious power as well.

 

The Roman Empire achieved peak urbanization rates of about 25-30% (Counting villages with populations of 10,000 as “urban”). While medieval England achieved peak urbanization rates of 15-20%. However, these large, populous kingdoms were the exception and the global average for urbanization in ancient times was about 2% of the world’s population.

In the 19th century countries surpassed the record urbanization levels set by Rome. This happened for two reasons:

  • Industrialization created the production line, where specialists worked in close proximity to increase productive efficiency.
  • Mechanization reduced the manpower required to grow and transport food, and other resources, to industrial cities.

 

In the ancient world, specialized craftsmen lived in cities with their large markets. Since the industrial revolution, the modern factory gave urban labour an added productivity bonus, while mechanization reduced the labour required in the countryside.

 

Why Urbanization May Reverse After 2050

 

While urbanization is current increasing, after 2050, technological developments undermine much of the rational for having cities.

The underlying rational for factories, production lines and economies of scale is the high cost of knowledge and skill. It takes time to train an excellent clothes maker. But if you divide the process into many less skilled tasks, teach different people to perform each task, hand the unfinished product to the next person and add some labour-saving machines, more units can be manufactured at a much lower per unit cost.

The second reason for economies of scale is that, by building big, you can get more relative precision from a given absolute precision. A large steam piston requires less absolute tolerance in the precision of the piston and tube diameter than a smaller piston. Workers with crude tools could achieve greater relative precision by building large machines.

 

The inexorable trend towards cheaper information and higher precision undermine both cases for economies of scale and may reverse urbanization after 2050. We no longer need a factory of workers to put together massive quantities of just one product – a single 3D printer can make many products. While the instructions on how to build sophisticated products may be complex, information is cheap, so the cost of instructing a 3D printer to build all manner of shapes is negligible. Furthermore, these 3D printers and CNC machines can be small, as absolute precision has vastly increased. Modern manufacturing systems are both small and sophisticated.

If a small box, no larger than a car, can build everything, then every village can have one (after all, most households own cars). And if every village has its own build-everything-machine, then why have large factories or cities to support them?

This abundance of cheap information and high absolute precision undermines the rational for economies of scale and specialization, which was originally why urbanization surpassed roman levels.

 

Cheap information also undermines the rational for ancient cities. Generalized, miniaturized manufacturing eliminates the need for mass markets while distributed cheap communication eliminates the need for large audiences in the same locality. This same communication technology could also enable the distributed coordination of power.

 

So again…what’s the point of cities?

 

A Surgery Room In Every House

 

But what about public services? Hospitals, mental health clinics, schools, universities, utilities such as electricity, internet etc.,

Hospitals are giant illness-treatment factories. Doctors are scarce. Therefore, the best way to deploy them is to cram ill people into the same building to reduce the time doctors spend travelling between patients. Furthermore, complex illnesses often involve multiple specialists and expensive equipment. Hospitals enable you to mix and match specialists by bringing them all under one roof where they can rapidly recombine into teams optimized to address a wide range of diseases. The underlying rational for hospitals is:

  • The expense of skills
  • The expense of specialized precision equipment

 

Ditto with psychiatry. Psychiatric wards are massive sanity production factories. Due to a scarcity of psychiatrists with skills to make crazy people sane (or less crazy), the optimal answer is to cram all the crazy people into a small crowded space, giving psychiatrist access to the maximum density of patients. This minimizes transit times between patients and maximizes the rate that psychiatrists can treat crazy people and make them sane (in theory).

 

Hospitals do three things:

  • Diagnose illnesses
  • Perform surgery
  • Administer complex regimens of drugs

 

The trend towards generalization, miniaturization and cost reduction will impact diagnosis machines (such as X-rays, CAT scans, blood analysis, etc.,) like everything else. It will also apply to the manufacturing of drugs. In the future, generalized drug manufacturing systems, the size of 3D printers, will stores primary organic compounds and be able to synthesize any drug under the sun, while robotic surgery systems have already been developed.

The end point of this trend is that, in the not too distant future (say, 30 years), every house will have a surgery room that can perform every conceivable operation from open heart surgery to cancer removal to hernia treatment as well as administering complex regimens of drugs.

As for mental health, all the skills that psychiatrists or psychiatric nurses possess could be downloaded into mass-produced androids giving everyone their own robot psychologist/psychiatrist that can also fix the plumbing, or teach the children.

Eliminating mass-production in hospitals and asylums has considerable advantages. Mass production is all right for surgery, but concentrating lots infected people in the same space can spread germs, and indeed hospital born infections are a major source of complications and even death. Psychiatric wards may bring lots of crazy people into contact with psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, but while it is sometimes helpful to bring crazy people together in controlled conditions (such as support groups) crazy people can also egg each other on to get crazier and crazier – so for psychiatry as well, home treatment by a fully trained android would be preferable to a lunatic asylum.

 

What about education and access to high quality schools and universities? Amazon and google have all the information you could possibly want and with free Lectures on YouTube – what else is there? While human educators are needed to kickstart the learning process, that human component will get a lot less specialized. Instead of separate teachers for history, geography, physics, biology, French, German, etc., a single human educator will train people to use search engines effectively, think critically and judge the credibility of different sources effectively. In the future, human educators will teach information management skills, but the internet and books downloaded onto Kindles will provide all the specific information.

In the future, a village with 100 people, an internet connection and one info management coach will be able to educate children to be more knowledgeable than today’s Harvard graduates. While 3D printers will produce equipment for laboratory demonstrations.

 

Even policing can be done with drones, but since rural areas, in the U.K. at least, have lower crime rates when compared to urban areas it’s quite likely that not that much policing may be required.

Home entertainment systems with large screen and surround sound will replace theatres.

 

So, if tomorrow’s technology can provide education, health, policing and entertainment, if anything, more efficiently in the countryside…what’s the point of urban living?

 

Should We Reverse Urbanization?

 

But should we reverse urbanization? Some say urbanization will lift billions out of poverty, others argue that cities use energy and resources more efficiently, yet others point to the lower fertility rates in cities compared to the countryside, (a reduction of between 1.5 and 2 children per woman in all countries) as evidence that urbanization will stabilize population size.

 

Lifting billions out of poverty: While cities currently do this, a whole slew of technology will soon greatly raise rural living standards. Solar panels, mobile phones and 4G internet already have this effect.

 

More efficient resource use: Rural inhabitants only consume more than city-dwellers in developed countries where they constantly commute to town for work or shopping. In developing countries, where rural populations live off the land and so travel less and have a smaller environmental footprint, urbanization massively increases consumption, car ownership and commuting.

Market societies, filled with specialists, are inherently energy intensive with buyers constantly buzzing about looking for sellers and vice versa. If we must live in a market society, high population densities increase their efficiency. However, flexible manufacturing, AI and ever cheaper information may render such societies obsolete. To reduce market dependence, our backyards must have enough resources to provide for us. However, this requires a larger backyard. Since rural living facilitates lower market dependence, and since less market dependence (with less goods and service-providers buzzing around) is more energy efficient, rural living (if done right) increases the efficient use of energy and resources.

 

Overpopulation: The narrative we are told is that by giving women the “opportunity” to live in cities they are “liberated” from the need to have children and therefore “choose” to have less. It is true that some traditional societies oppress their women, yet if fewer children are a sign of women’s “liberation”, why do many highly successful, affluent women such as Victoria Beckham, or Demi Moore, or wealthy women in general have more children than average? While women may choose affluence and material comforts over children and abusive relationships, those who can have it all (money, a loving husband and lots of kids) choose large families.

So, does urbanization “allow” women to have small families or does it force them to make a difficult choice between material wealth, no time for childcare and no kids – or a large family in a poor, crime-ridden neighbourhood?

If urbanization reduces the concern of overpopulation, it does so by pressurizing women to remain childless, often against their will. Furthermore, studies robustly show that cities have higher levels of mental illness compared to rural areas and higher crime rates.

If population growth really is a problem, we should simply have a two-child policy (or exchangeable child quotas like carbon quotas) as opposed to manipulatively putting financial pressure on women to live in stressful, crowded urban environments where they have less children because they are generally uncomfortable and then saying: “Look everyone! Women are ‘spontaneously’ deciding to have less children! Isn’t it great! We don’t have to worry about overpopulation anymore!” It’s absurd to say we should not reverse urbanization because high population densities create emotional distress which discourages people from having children.

 

Basic Income Is The Catalyst

 

Cities remain important centres of manufacturing, education and art and culture to this day. But less and less people work in the factories that do the manufacturing. Increasingly city jobs (psychiatrists, social workers, policemen) are produced by city problems – along with hype to sell overpriced merchandise and tickets to overrated events (advertising executives, tabloid journalists, etc.). Additionally, large corporations, headquartered in cities, are buying up the countryside – farmland, forests and mines – and funneling the profits from harvesting (or pillaging) nature into the salaries of executives located in the city.

Furthermore, debt creates money and the dominant form of debt is mortgages to buy town housing. Banks lend money out of thin air to people who buy houses in the city. As this lending continues, the last batch of borrowers find their city house has gone up in value. They celebrate and spend the money in cocktail bars, restaurants, and the local economy. In this way, newly printed money preferentially goes to city dwellers.

There are two ways to make money: work for someone who has money or buy a speculative asset that goes up in value. Since lots of money flows into the city and since town housing is the speculative asset with the highest value, this means that those looking for a decent wage must often move into the city as the countryside is starved of cash.

Basic income could change all that. Capital is always getting cheaper. Items like, toasters, computers, 3D printers, mobile phones, bicycles and many other gizmos are all falling below the £100 mark. If purchased second hand, many can be procured below the £10 mark. In the developed world, people’s main expenses are rent, transport and food (perhaps alcohol and drugs as well).  A small basic income that enables people to procure the capital they need to live and grow food on cheap rural land without travelling to the city could simultaneously reduce the cost of rent, food and transportation. While communication technology, along with flexible manufacturing, will make rural communities increasingly “with it” and raise their quality of life.

An income delivered to everyone, independent of their location, would let people live everywhere. It seems likely many would use this income to move somewhere with more personal space and a lower cost of living. Many pensioners today move out of the city the instant they retire, so there’s every reason to believe that basic income could be the catalyst that enables people to live a better life in the countryside while raising wages and lowering rents in the city.

 

The Countryside Living Allowance provides the details of how a basic income could be introduced to transform the countryside and the city on a realistic budget.

 

John

 

Do You Have a Burning Desire to Leave a Comment?

 

Have you found this article thought provoking? Is there some message you desperately want to communicate to future readers but can’t because my comment section automatically closes 28 days after my posts go live?

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If you’d like to leave a comment, simply scroll to the bottom of the page, sign on to my mailing list and them email me with a request to reopen the comments section for this post.

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John

Basic Income, Self-Provision and Full Employment

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Basic income is a hot topic these days.

Recognized advantages include: removing the bureaucracy; the forms; the interrogations; the mandatory courses, job applications, job interviews, penalties for non-compliance, and the accompanying fear of getting cut off. A Reliable provision of income to everyone eliminates the decision-making process over who to pay and the accompanying risk, from the point of view of recipients, that the decision-maker will cut them off.

Basic income’s main disadvantage is that it is not targeted at those in need. A given tax revenue paid evenly to everyone will give the needy less than one paid solely to them. The UK’s welfare budget can afford to pay everyone about £4,000 per year without tax hikes. That’s not much.

Here, a case in favour of basic income is built from three points:

  • Basic income has a higher credit value than means-tested benefits
  • Basic Income should not be compared to a living wage. Paid work depletes time. Basic income does not. This leaves recipients time for cash-saving activities.
  • Job-seekers allowance and working tax credits push people into the labour market. Increasing the supply of labour reduces its price (i.e. wages). The provision of basic income does not push people into the labour market, and so supports wage levels.

 

Credit Value of Basic Income

 

When bank managers decide whether to lend someone money, they look at their assets, their income and, finally, the reliability of that income. Applicants with unreliable incomes are either charged more interest or turned down.

Two defining features of our age are record low interest rates, set by central banks, and an increasingly precarious job market. Together, these two factors are driving wealth inequality to levels not seen since World War 2. Record low interest rates enable asset owners to access cheap credit with which to buy yet more assets. Many asset owners all using cheap loans to buy assets inflate asset prices which can then be used as collateral for yet more loans. Meanwhile those with insecure jobs must pay interest rates that are 5 to 10 times higher on any money they borrow. This interest rate apartheid between asset owners and precarious workers is the root driver of inequality today.

The provision of income through means-tested benefits is precarious. It starts and stops, it gets revised up and down based on increased hours, changes in savings, missed appointments, changes in government policy and a myriad of other factors. This means someone on means-tested benefits, applying for a loan, will either be charged very high interest or refused.

Even a relatively small uncertainty in an income source drastically affects the interest rate (especially when central banks set rates low), and correspondingly the principal which that income can service.

For example, if there is a 10% chance per year that a benefit recipient will get cut off, the bank must charge 10% interest to compensate for the default risk. A fiscally responsible person receiving a fully secure basic income, on the other hand, would probably get charged a mortgage-like interest rate of 3%.

Thus, £4,000 of precarious income could at most service a £40,000 loan at 10% interest.

While the fully secure £4,000 basic income could service a £133,000 loan at 3% interest.

Basic income provides far more credit bang per benefit buck than means-tested benefits. Pilot studies in India confirm that even a low basic income significantly helps poor people to access to credit at lower interest rates.

This point is crucial: the cheaper credit, that basic income facilitates, lets people purchase capital today to save expenses tomorrow. The front-ended purchase of cost-saving capital produces a higher quality life from less money. Basic income provides more benefit from less payment. It’s a much more efficient way to pay out benefits.

 

Basic Income and Self-Provision

 

Due to its high credit value, a relatively modest basic income (of perhaps, £4,000 a year) in a low interest rate environment could enable its recipient to raise a significant amount of capital (perhaps £100,000+).

This creates many opportunities for buying capital today to save expenses tomorrow.

A key point to remember, when comparing basic income to a living wage, is those who work 40 hours a week to earn a living wage have depleted their time. Those with an unconditional basic income, however, still have those 40 hours to add value with their labour to any capital they have purchased with their income. This surplus time enables someone on an unconditional basic income to live a far better life than someone who earns a similar wage.

For example, it is much cheaper to buy raw materials to construct a house as opposed to buying the finished house. Indeed Open Source Ecology is working on a turnkey design, combined with instruction videos that will enable anyone to build a house and a hydroponic greenhouse from starting materials costing just £25,000. This way, you can produce the same final house by expending far less money but far more time and effort – yet if you’ve got nothing better to do with your time, applying it to build a house is no loss and a big gain. Consider cooking (or otherwise preparing) a meal verses buying one in a restaurant, consider purchasing fertilizer, gardening tools and a greenhouse as opposed to buying food in a supermarket. Supermarket food may seem cheap, but, remember, land costs less in the countryside than in the city, so growing food in your back garden, not only saves the cost of buying the food, but also the cost of living near, or travelling to, a supermarket. Bicycling as opposed to driving is another example of trading time and effort for money to achieve the same result.

Many means-tested benefits are calculated on the basis of personal expenses, especially rent in the case of housing benefit. This perversely incentivizes benefit recipients to increase their expenses. A fixed income, on the other hand, encourages people to seek creative ways to reduce expenses and cash in the surplus. The most obvious way to save money is to move to a cheap area. This option is unavailable to those who work in an expensive location and indeed, as this graph shows, average after-rent wages are identical up and down the country. This implies that landlords collect most of the surplus produced in wealthy cities. Thus, by freeing people from expensive locations and freeing up time for self-provision (as oppose to filling out endless job applications, as Job Seekers Allowance requires), surprisingly little money could facilitate a decent standard of living.

Uniquely as an economic activity, self-provision doesn’t require anyone’s permission. Those who work for themselves with tools and raw materials purchased with basic income do not need employers to hire them or customers to purchase their goods, they can just get on with it – no permission, or CV, required. This means the economic activity of self-provision on a modest basic income can automatically fully absorb an arbitrarily large unemployed population. Many critics of basic income would prefer to supply everyone with guaranteed work. However, a basic income set at an affordable level is, to all intents and purposes, a guaranteed job. The provision of basic income is an indirect provision of employment. No one on £4,000 a year would sit around doing nothing – they couldn’t afford to, or at least wouldn’t want to – as their quality of life would be very low. Instead, anyone on £4,000 a year would spend their time working industriously to extract the maximum value from every penny they got.

Furthermore, unlike make-work guaranteed job schemes, those employing themselves in the activity of self-provision requires no supervision at all. Since people providing for themselves reap the benefit of their own industry, there is no way to skive off and game the system. This simultaneously raises productivity and eliminates the need for supervisors that peer over the backs of guaranteed workers to make sure they perform their make-work jobs.

 

Higher Wages, Wealth Creation and The Benefits of Full Employment

 

If we quit our jobs, we lose money and gain time. The extra available time can be devoted to working at a job that pays more, and people often quit their jobs when offered a higher paying job elsewhere. One could also use the extra time acquired from quitting a job to run a business. This would make sense if the hourly profit generated by that business exceeds your old salary.

Other than working at your own business, or a higher paying job, you could work to provide value for yourself (such as building a house, growing food, brewing beer, etc.). This is a key point: Unlike other activities, which may not be available, self-provision is always an available option for healthy people. If the benefit from a given amount of time spent providing for your own needs exceeds the benefit of your salary at work, then it makes sense to quit your job and provide for yourself instead. And because self-provision is available to everyone, then if there are enough rational people to set the price of labour…

…the benefit that someone providing for themselves can extract from a given period of time and industry will set the wage floor everywhere.

In 1879, Henry George eloquently expressed this principle in his landmark book Progress and Poverty in the chapter, Wages And The Law of Wages

Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty

“…what, in conditions of freedom, will be the terms at which one man can hire others to work for him? Evidently, they will be fixed by what the men could make if labouring for themselves. The principle which will prevent him from having to give anything above this, except what is necessary to induce the change, will also prevent them from taking anything less. Did they demand more, the competition of others would prevent them from getting employment. Did he offer less, none would accept the terms, as they could obtain greater results by working for themselves.”

 

 

 

 

 

However, the wealth that someone can produce working for themselves depends on available tools and raw materials. Without an initial supply of tools or raw materials, the value of our time is low indeed – and tools and raw materials cost money.

Wealth is created by applying labour to capital. If someone wishes to mow the lawn, they will be far more productive with a lawn mower than a pair of scissors, conversely a regularly used lawn mower will be more productive compared to one left idle in a garden shed. Hence:

Capital amplifies the productivity of each hour of labour, while labour amplifies the productivity of each unit of capital.

This means a basic income that enable recipients to access more capital will raise the value of the time they spend providing for themselves and hence baseline wages across the board. Since labour and capital have a multiplicative effect on each other, basic income will raise wages to many times the value of the income itself. If labour amplifies the value of capital (tools and raw materials) by a factor of 5, then a basic income of just £4,000 a year could raise wages everywhere to £16,000!!!

Henry George’s Law of Wages can also be used to infer that a basic income will create new wealth. According to this law, the aggregate benefit produced by basic income recipients applying their labour to capital exactly equals the salary forgone by not spending that time working for someone else. If a £4,000 basic income raised the wage floor to £16,000 then someone who chose to provide for themselves as opposed to getting a job for £12,000 actually produces an additional £4,000 of wealth compared to a situation without basic income where they were forced to labour for less. By more efficiently capitalizing the poorest members of society, even a modest basic income would increase the productivity of their labour.

And if we agree that labouring industriously to provide for yourself is a productive, wealth-producing use of time, then universal basic income will give rise to full employment along with all its corresponding benefits!

Basic income can buffer a flexible, non-exploitative labour market. Today we shudder at the term “flexible labour market” due to the implication that one moment you have an income, the next moment you’re left high and dry. But once people can use basic income to set up a homestead with the tools they need to provide for themselves, flexible labour markets become less ominous. For those working from a foundation of self-provision, flexible labour markets will merely be a source of pocket money.

 

An Integrated Strategy

 

For universal basic income to truly benefit society, two other things must accompany it:

  • A program to provide cheap credit to poorer people who wish to become self-sufficient
  • A government funded information resource, that informs people how to provide the best possible livelihood with their income. Including the best skills to develop and the best tools to work with.

Bank managers will effectively serve as gatekeepers to prevent wasteful people without a plan from front-loading their income as a capital loan. Conversely, it is also vital that responsible people who are poor can access cheap credit to front-load their income. Means-tested default subsidies are a possible solution. If the government refunded, say, 50% of the money that banks lost as debt defaults from low interest self-sufficiency loans issued to those on low incomes, then banks would not lend out to really dodgy customers, as they would still lose 50% of the defaulted sum, but if only low interest loans to those with low incomes qualified for the subsidy, then interest rates could be held down.

 

Phasing It In

 

In my book, The Countryside Living Allowance, I discuss how to phase in a basic income so as to minimize the costs (along with costing estimates) and maximize the positive impact. Basic income will have the biggest impact where the cost of living is lowest. Therefore, initially limiting basic income to regions with a low cost of living would reduce its budget while still raising wages everywhere, as those on lower incomes would move to where they could collect the allowance. Furthermore, the allowance could be linked to a Land value covenant, so that the government could raise more revenue as more people moved into regions that qualified for the benefit.

If this article is of interest, and you want to learn more, read The Countryside Living Allowance to get the details.

 

John

 

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Cryogenic Body Preservation, Benefits Society

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A human model demonstrating whole body storage (© Cryonics Institute)

Since ancient Egypt and before people tried to protect deceased souls by preserving their bodies. Modern cryogenic body preservation techniques mean a realistic, albeit speculative, possibility exists that a future society, with unimaginably advanced medical technology, might someday revive those who opt for cryogenic body storage today. No human has yet been revived from liquid nitrogen temperatures, but less extreme examples of revival from below normal body temperatures abound. Scientists successfully revived dogs, cooled to 3 degrees Celsius, whose hearts had stopped beating for 3 hours. A 2 year old boy whose heart had stopped beating and body temperature had dropped was also revived. Small extremophiles, were revived after being frozen for 30 years. In 2016, the detailed structure of an entire rabbit’s brain was successfully stored at cryogenic temperatures without synaptic damage.

The Immortality Foundation has a good overview of the state of the art in cryonics technology here.

Cryonics has its detractors. Indeed, the society of cryo-biologists, who oppose cryogenic body preservation with borderline fanaticism, have branded those working in it as frauds and have even banned anyone who has cryogenically preserved deceased individuals from joining their society – forever. Yet although detractors often deploy strongly worded criticisms, their arguments and evidence are often lacking and a fairly comprehensive (albeit non-professional) survey of anti-cryonics literature has come to the following conclusion:

 

“Because as far as I can tell, if you want to write the best anti-cryonics article in the world, you have a very low bar to clear.”

 

Let us begin with the most important question: Are the proponents of cryogenic body preservation con-men?

The process of dying, obviously damages the body a great deal. Cryogenic cooling does further damage, and people engaged in cryogenic body preservation constantly look for new ways to minimize the damage of this cooling process. However, once the body has stabilized at cryogenic temperatures, no further damage will occur – forever. A body cryogenically cooled very low temperatures will be in the same condition a million years in the future as it was a few hours after the cryogenic cooling process is completed.

Of all the different ways we deal with legally dead bodies, cryonics causes the least subsequent long-term damage – by a very large margin.

If we agree that:

The less physical damage a body sustains, the greater its chance of future revival.

…and it’s hard to see how one can deny this. Then we must conclude:

That of all possible treatments for legally dead bodies, cryogenic body preservation is the one with the highest chance of revival – by a very large margin.

There is, of course, no guarantee that cryogenically stored people will ever be revived, but those in cryonics conscientiously try their very best to minimize the physical damage that occurs after legal death. This is an indisputable fact.

 

Cryonics Costs

 

But is it worth the money?

Today, the Cryonics Institute quotes the cost of full body preservation at $28,000 plus a one time membership fee of $1,250. By comparison, those who’d rather an English churchyard to a Californian Refrigerator, could be set back by as much as £8,000 for a plot in the city plus another £2,000 in funeral costs. Thus, preserving your body forever through cryonics costs a little over twice as much as being left to rot in the ground.

 

But wouldn’t the extra $14,000 that cryogenic freezing costs over a fancy funeral be better given to some other good cause?

Cryonics is a good cause. Cryonicists are constantly improving and developing new procedures to cool down patients in ways that do less damage to make revival easier. At some point, future cryonic technology should be able to freeze and reawaken a healthy person. When pressed to estimate when the first living person will survive being frozen and thawed, the president of the Cryonics Institute, Dennis Kowalski, has stated “The true scientific answer is that no one knows for sure because no one knows the future. If I were forced to take a guess I would say no sooner than the next 50 years and probably less than 100 years.”

Reversible, affordable cryogenic body storage could save many lives. For a start, far less people with urgent conditions would die on waitlists for highly specialized treatments, saving many lives. It could also facilitate interstellar travel – a noble cause indeed.

But to advance cryogenic preservation technology, lots of practice, lots of testing and lots of donors are needed. Those who’ve currently paid for the cost of cryonic preservation have effectively bought a ticket in a charity raffle whose proceeds are donated to life-saving research into reversible cryogenic preservation to enable people in the future, with life threatening illnesses, to safely and reversibly freeze themselves. The first prize in this raffle is the off-chance that immense future technological advances will enable them to be reawakened, rejuvenated and live a life of immortal youth.

 

And cryonics is the best technology currently available to preserve our bodies.

 

But what about critics who say that living too long is selfish?

 

Cryonic Storage containers awaiting a better future (© Cryonics Institute)

Perhaps living is selfish, and perhaps that’s a good thing. I’ve heard many elderly people say things like: “The world’s going to the dogs! I’m glad I won’t be alive to see it!” I’ve also heard younger people say things like: “You mean global warming could actually happen in my lifetime? You mean there’s a good chance I’ll actually live to see the effects of massive climate change? For real?” with a sudden look of horror on their face.

Cryogenic body preservation may well reduce the extent we live for the present…while trashing the future. Cryogenic freezing can only secure immortality if tremendous technological progress occurs in the future, society doesn’t collapse, and future generations are benign and kindhearted enough to revive those who opt to freeze themselves. A single bomb landing on a cryo-facility could obliterate all hope of immortality. This may be a tall order. Civilization could very possibly collapse, for one reason or another. Then no one would get revived.

In my opinion, this is the real reason why some people insist that, even with millions of years of exponential technological advancement, it is fundamentally impossible to ever physically, or even digitally, revive those who are cryogenically frozen today.

We can’t stand the idea we have a real chance of immortality…but will probably screw up and destroy civilization. Or perhaps we sense that our culture is becoming so selfish and egotistical, that future generations won’t bother to resurrect  cryogenically preserved individuals. At the back of our minds we know that exponential economic growth can’t continue, that AI poses a serious threat, that, given enough time, a future major war seems inevitable and we are not doing enough in global politics today to tackle this threat, that manufacturing and agriculture needs to be completely overhauled to stop producing toxins that damage our ecosystem… and that securing civilization’s long term future will take A LOT of hard work.

It’s so much easier to ignore these really difficult problems, make a bit of money, buy a new car, hang out in the pub, head out to the disco, and ignore the fate of future generations. The possibility, but improbability, of immortality due to the likely collapse of our civilization, the immense problems we must surmount to avoid it, and the hard work this requires is a burden too heavy for most to shoulder. Most people cannot bear to contemplate the vast potential value they are throwing away tomorrow by acting irresponsibly today.

If most people truly believed they could personally live in a bright, technologically advanced future by working to secure it, we would take long-term problems a lot more seriously. We would also encourage people to care for others and value human life – to dispose future generations to revive those in cryogenic body storage.

Most importantly, cryonics helps curb elderly AI researchers (who desire immortality) from rushing to develop whole brain emulations without adequate safety precautions. Humans are not universally nice. Jesus was a person. Mahatma Gandhi was a person. But so was, Hitler, Ted Bundy, Genghis Khan and Charles Manson. Whole brain emulation will make an operating system, that produced Genghis Khan, a billion times faster and gives it perfect memory. This has obvious potential dangers. We should undertake whole brain emulation with great caution. Yet caution will slow down the development timescale. Those who would die from the delay need a safer technology to secure their survival. That safer technology is cryonics.

 

So cryonic storage has many benefits.

 

John

 

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The Problem With Prohibition

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How Protests Against Mining Operations Can Subsidize Oppression

 

Are attempts by some deep ecologists to prohibit mineral extraction as misguided as the temperance movement’s alcohol ban in the 1920s?                                                                       (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com)

Violence is dangerous and risky. While some self-destructive individuals commit violence for no gain, sophisticated organized violence needs profit to compensate members of gangs and other organizations for the risk of the violent acts they commit.

So where does the money to pay gang members to intimidate, attack and kill those who interfere with an organization come from?

Sometimes, it’s plain theft – burglary or intimidating businesses for “protection money”.

The more interesting case, which I’ll focus on here, is where criminal gangs run a profitable business (other than outright thievery), whose profits they can use to pay off heavies and hit men to commit violent acts on behalf of the gang.

But what about business competition? If violence is costly, then surely a peaceful business that can produce the same goods with less overheads for violence will be able to undercut violent competitors on price and drive them out of business.

 

 

Thus:

Provided law enforcement effectively prevents robbery (including shoplifting), ransoming and racketeering, businesses will adopt models that fund ever less violence.

 

So, what allows violent gangs that profit from businesses other than outright theivery to exist?

 

The answer: they can only exist if no nonviolent business model is available. This will be the case if the activity they profit from is illegal and customers are willing to pay a price that exceeds the cost of non-compliance. Every business needs to enforce contracts, whether with customers, employees or suppliers. Legal businesses can sue transgressors in court, but illegal businesses must use thugs and hit-men to punish those who break their word. Furthermore, much of a gang’s valuable “property” (such as drugs, arms, smuggled goods, etc.) is illegal contraband, so gangs cannot report the theft of their valuables to the police. Thus, an initial opportunity to profit from illegal activities creates a situation where rival gangs can steal each other’s contraband without police intervention leading to increased violence and gang war.

 

For this cycle of violence to initiate, there first must be:

  • A profitable business model requiring violence (i.e. no viable non-violent version)
  • Sufficient market demand to raise prices high enough to cover the overhead of non-compliance and violence
  • No available legal substitute at a price lower than the production price (including all overheads) of the illegal good or service

 

Using legal violence to suppress a good’s supply will thus raise prices and give rise to illegal violence to supply that good – regardless of the law.

Prohibitions enforced by violence will often give rise to violent reactions.

A ban on regulated brothels funds street-hookers and sex slavery; a ban on drugs funds drug gangs; a ban on weapons funds gun runners; tariffs of all kinds fund smuggling rings; migration restrictions fund people-trafficking and on…and on… and on…

 

Hardcore libertarians conclude from this: “don’t prohibit anything.” One may adopt this position, but even if one doesn’t, goods or services should probably not be prohibited without at least estimating the consumer response. Will consumers pay a higher price to purchase the prohibited service illegally, or will they substitute it with a legal good or service instead? Without estimating the consumer response, a prohibition may have disastrous consequences – in extreme instances, the proliferation of crime may resemble a low-key insurrection.

Another problem with shadow industries is the lack of reporting. If someone gets their house burgled, their child kidnapped or their business held to ransom, they will likely report it. However, shadow industries can turn a healthy profit while satisfying the interests of most participants. A shadow industry can exist without creating wronged, indignant individuals who report misdeeds to police. And those who are wronged (e.g. beaten up over drug debts), usually participate in the industry, can be blackmailed and are reluctant to report, even serious wrongs, to the police (seen as the “enemy”).

Some things like child prostitution should be prohibited. But governments must choose their battles wisely and prepare legal, socially accepted avenues for demand substitution – or design campaigns to reduce demand. Prohibiting supply without also drastically reducing demand is a recipe for organized crime.

 

Mining and The “Resource Curse”

 

So, what does this all have to do with mining?

 

Environmentalists campaign against mining companies the whole world over. Their strategies typically involve mobilising grassroots mass-opposition against mining projects and supporting infrastructure (such as Canada’s keystone pipeline), lobbying for laws that raise the cost of mining and filing court case after court case against mining projects.

However, all these strategies rely heavily on a democratically enfranchised population and the rule of law. In countries with a centralized elite, a disenfranchised population, high levels of corruption, and a de facto absence of law, campaigns against mining companies often end with key environmental campaigners sadly being assassinated.

So our understanding of “the resource curse”, the theory that mineral resources produce corruption, may need revision. Resources are everywhere, but NIMBYs in well-governed democratic countries with a strong judiciary, block access to local resources and challenge new mining projects in municipal government and in court. The net result of this comprehensive campaigning against all mining projects in the developed world is:

  • A reduction in the supply of minerals
  • That raises the price
  • With windfall profits for governments that crush grass roots opposition against local mining projects.

 

Thus, just as prohibition funds violent crime, grassroots democratic and legal opposition to mining projects funds despotism, opacity and corruption.

 

Violent actions give rise to violent reactions.

Violent grassroots opposition gives rise to the violent suppression of that opposition – if not in the same country, then in a different one.

 

Environmentalists don’t just resist mining projects everywhere. They also support expanding resource intensive industries like renewable energy and lithium ion batteries. Where will the minerals for the batteries and wind turbines come from? The magic metal tree?

A contradiction lies at the heart of environmentalism. Its campaigns increase global demand for mined goods, by advocating rapidly rolling out renewables, battery-powered cars and a HVDC super grid, yet at every opportunity it fights to reduce supply. Something has to give – and that something is democracy. The two-pronged effort to increase global demand for commodities and reduce their supply will produce massive cash transfers to dictators that crush locals who oppose mining projects.

The blanket, global, grassroots opposition that mining companies face against new projects everywhere has a similar effect to alcohol prohibition – times 100. We’ve waged a futile war against the supply of minerals while ignoring the demand, with disastrous humanitarian costs. If we want to stop funding dictatorships with blood diamonds and oil money, then environmental groups need to establish a league table of mining companies and projects all over the world and work with companies to promote projects with a comparatively low environmental impact and campaign in support of them to help assuage local opposition.

 

Only then can the resource curse be lifted.

 

A Peaceful Place to Mine

 

Underwater mining could supply the global demand for commodities without destroying indigenous people’s livelihood. So why do many environmental groups oppose it? (Photograph provided courtesy of Nautilus Minerals)

The rapid maturation of underwater mining technology and the exploration of underwater mineral resources could greatly curb the violations of indigenous land rights. Mining the oceans could end the battle between mining companies and locals with the accompanying corruption, bribery and militant suppression. Finally, minerals could be extracted from a region in no one’s back yard. Yet, despite the potential of underwater mining to reduce global corruption, promote democracy and protect human rights, environmentalists oppose it in a vague knee-jerk fashion to “save the tube worms.”

It’s time to grow up. If we truly support renewable energy, it’s time to decide where to mine the minerals we need to build that infrastructure.

 

John

 

Disclosure: I own a few shares in the underwater mining company, Nautilus Minerals.

 

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