Season 4 Recap

In this final episode of Season 4, Rik from Planet Vulcan reviews his mission on Planet Earth, which is to advocate for a world view based on the scientific investigation of natural processes; and reviews the essays published during Season 4.
Rik and his little female Earthling pal are traveling to the the land of Aloha until winter has passed in the Smoky Mountains, with plans to return with more essays in the spring.

Transcript

Season 4 Recap

 Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My continuing mission on Planet Earth:  to search for signs of intelligence and to encourage its spread.

 Once again my little female Earthling pal and I are preparing to leave our home in the Smoky Mountains as winter approaches, and travel to a warmer place until the springtime.  Look for the beginning episodes of Season 5 at that time.

 Let’s take a few moments to review the Vulcan mission on Planet Earth, and the topics that made up the episodes of Season 4.

 My mission is to help promote the development of civilization on Planet Earth by encouraging Earthlings to adopt a way of thinking based on a study of evolutionary processes; to break free of medievalist ways of thinking based on archaic theories of intelligent design; and to demonstrate that intelligent design thinking is more pervasive than you might have expected, showing up in many areas of thought besides biological evolution.

 If you find any of the topics discussed below particularly interesting, I invite you to listen to the episodes in their entirety.  And we invite you to have a listen to episodes from previous seasons as well.

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 Season 4 opened with a discussion of Moral blackmail:  this essay was penned in response to the appearance of Chris Anderson, the curator of Ted Talks, on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast.  Chris was promoting his new book, “Infectious Generosity”.  

 Chris’s insight is that Earthlings in general are hard-wired not only to derive pleasure from exercising benevolence, but also to derive pleasure from witnessing other Earthlings exercising benevolence – it’s infectious.

 We noted that, surprisingly, neither Sam nor Chris can see any other way to spread well-being than the way of self-sacrifice, and they see it as part of their mission to convince Earthlings that benevolence is a duty rather than a choice.

 And most remarkably, both men are blind to the true source of most of the spread of well-being on your planet, which is production and commerce enhanced by scientific discovery and technological innovation.  

 They believe that it is only through philanthropic endeavors that the world’s worst off can be delivered from poverty!

 Chris actually stated, and Sam agreed, that the wealth of the rich is “locked away” and not doing anyone any good, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this wealth is invested in productive assets; and productive asset investment has been, and is, a far more significant driver of the spread of prosperity than is charitable action.  

 And they lay on the scolding, the moral blackmail and accusations of (gasp!) selfishness as a means of inducing more charitable action, and give no evidence that they are aware of the opportunity cost involved.

 I’m sure they mean well.

 Fascinating!

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 Misinformation (Making (Non)sense):  we again turned our spotlight on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast, when the featured guest this time was legal scholar Cass Sunstein.  Professor Sunstein was promoting his new book, “Look Again: the Power of Noticing What was Always There”, evidently a delightful read full of valuable insights.

 Towards the end of the interview, the conversation turned to a discussion of “misinformation” on social media, and what ought to be the government response.  

 The discussion at this point became a bit surreal, as both men agreed that government institutions should be the proper arbiter of what constitutes true information, and that it is difficult for them to understand why so many Earthlings are skeptical of pronouncements by governments.  After all, Earthlings trust the veracity of government announcements about school closures on snow days, so why shouldn’t they also trust government efforts to censor speech on social media?

 Apparently neither man saw any potential problems with decisions about veracity being made by those in positions of authority.  We should note that, although he is a strong supporter of First Amendment protections, Sunstein has in the past expressed concerns about things that might go wrong with “too much” freedom of speech in his 1994 book, “Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech”, where he claimed to see a role for government intervention.

 A more appealing idea to me is the Jeffersonian idea that the cure for too much freedom is more freedom.

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 Student loan crisis (Another fine mess):   Beginning with a small program to encourage more students to enter the fields of science and technology in response to the “space race” following the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the student loan program gradually grew into a massive out-of-control enterprise where, beginning in 2010 when the government began making loans directly to students, virtually anyone could obtain tens of thousands of dollars, and even more, if they would sign up for a course of study at an approved institution.

 As is typical with attempts at socially engineering things that are better left to evolving market processes, unintended consequences abound:  tuition has soared, even as admission standards and the quality of a college education have markedly diminished, with the result that many loan recipients have now found themselves saddled with a burden of debt they are unable to carry.

 There is no good way out of the mess that has been created.  It would be damaging to the fabric of society to forgive the loans, but it would likewise be damaging to the fabric of society to insist that the students pay.  And how can it be fair to students who did not take loans and provide a benefit only to students who did?

 Did I say “would be” damaging?  The damage has already been done, is still being done, and it is now just a question of how best to absorb it.  The best Earthlings can now hope for is that realization of the futility of trying to hot-wire reality by employing intelligent-design schemes will become ever more widespread, and that enthusiasm for such interventions will wane as a result.

 As of this writing, no reforms have been made to the student loan program which address the roots of the problem, and direct student loans are still freely available.  There have only been band-aid reforms so far, all aimed at easing the burden on borrowers.

 One might be forgiven for suspecting that the true reason for the “ongoing” part of this ongoing debacle is the support of a forever constituency in the educational establishment, which benefits from this lavish flow of funding.

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 Universal basic income (Slavery Lite):  many Earthling public intellectuals have been arguing lately in favor of a “universal basic income”, to be paid from tax receipts.

 They claim that such a program would solve many problems, such as the anxiety so many people feel over the stress of having to earn a living, and that since intelligent machines most certainly will soon be producing so much with so little human labor (unless they intentionally or inadvertently cause Earthlings to go extinct) scarcity will soon be a thing of the past, they say.  

 They claim further that the idea that you need to produce in order to “deserve” income is nothing more than an arbitrary societal norm, and that Earthlings can be conditioned to believe in a different norm, where income and production are decoupled.

 Surely this idea is a legacy of the feudal landed aristocracy; their income was obviously decoupled from their production, so it probably never occurred to them that it couldn’t be the same for everyone.

 Actually your chances of decoupling the north pole and the south pole of a magnet are better than decoupling income and production, because income and production are identical.  Production is income.

 The idea that an adult must produce in order to receive income, far from being an arbitrary cultural choice, is in fact merely a recognition of the inescapable fact that if you are getting something for nothing, then somebody somewhere must be getting nothing for something.

 And if liberty, justice and equality are important to you, then you will not want to put anyone in this position of getting nothing for something.  

 Are liberty, justice and equality also merely arbitrary societal norms?  Or do they stem from evolved human nature?

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 We then profiled Karl Marx:  Marx’s writings did not create much of a stir during his lifetime.  But during the twentieth century much stirring indeed occurred.

 His ideas about dictatorial government and state ownership of the means of production were adopted by the Bolshevik party in Russia and by the Fascist parties in Europe.

 And although Marx had believed that the next cycle in the historical dialectic would arise from the increasing class consciousness amongst the proletariat, no such thing ever happened.  Instead, Marx’s ideas were adopted by the intelligentsia, who with benefit of hindsight we can now see should have been called the “stupidsia”.

 Marx’s ideas appealed, and still do, to people who believe in the intelligent design of the entire social system, with themselves as the designers and the rulers.  Except for the Hegelian mysticism that accompanied these ideas in more modern times, it is difficult to distinguish their ideas from the ideas of the feudal aristocracy, ensconced in their castles and ruling over the manors.

 The foundation of modern Marxianity is the labor theory of value, which was dead and buried over a century ago, but will not stay in its grave.  This undead idea has become a dogma in the modern highly influential quasi-religious movement of Marxianity.

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 We then had a look at the Biosphere II project, also known as Biodome.  Biodome was an attempt to replicate on a small scale the evolved biosphere of Planet Earth, with the aim of enabling space exploration and the colonization by Earthlings of other planets.

 The experiment was an exercise in intelligent design.  It quickly failed, as the amount of complexity that the experimenters actually encountered was orders of magnitude beyond the amount of complexity they had anticipated.  

 There is a lesson to be learned here from the observation that natural evolution always pursues its own course; one cannot imagine an ideal outcome and then force it into being – nature does not care about our intentions.

 Most Earthlings have, however, reacted to the Biodome failure by saying they just need to get better at anticipating and managing the complexity, as if there is still some hope that an intelligent design solution could work.

 Fascinating!

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 We then discussed the phenomenon of Blockchain technology, which was created as an element of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, which was introduced in 2009.

 Blockchain is a ledger system that functions without a central authority.  As such it has many potential applications, the most interesting of which is probably the possible replacement of fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

 Fiat currency is inherently problematic because of the temptation faced by the monetary authorities to create ever more of the currency as an alternative to taxation, with the only limitation being political will.  Political will has frequently been ineffective at such limitation, and that is why Earthlings have experienced so much inflation with their fiat currencies.

 The creator(s) of Bitcoin instituted Bitcoin mining as a cost feedback loop that would automatically limit the creation of new Bitcoin, in a way that is similar to what happened during the period of the gold standard, where there was also an automatic feedback loop because it was costly to produce more gold.  Under the gold standard in the United States, the average rate of inflation was virtually zero for long periods of time.

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 We next told the story of the Marginal revolution which began in the late 1800’s.  The importance of this advance in the science of economics is impossible to exaggerate, and led to, among other things, the conclusion that value is ultimately subjective, even though the act of valuation is tied to objective reality in the eyes of the valuers.  

 The explanatory power of the subjective theory of value blew the archaic labor theory of value out of the water (even though there are a distressingly large number of otherwise intelligent Earthlings who cling to the labor theory of value as a quasi-religious dogma).

 Thinking at the margin is the key to making value-maximizing decisions, and the more you personally adopt thinking at the margin the better your life will be.

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 We then discussed the idea of Secularism, and pointed out that even though many Earthlings of a religious persuasion regard secularism as a rival religion, a more fruitful way to regard secularism is as a common ground for all Earthlings to meet on, because true secularism disadvantages no one.  The tradeoff is that religionists of all stripes, and this includes Marxians, must forswear the use of force as a means of compelling other Earthlings to accept their beliefs.

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 The next essay was about Radicalized vision:  attaining “radicalized vision” is to a Marxian the equivalent of being “born again” to a Christian.  In both of these traditions, and in other traditions, the one who has undergone “conversion” believes wholeheartedly that they are now seeing things as they “really are”; even though to an outside observer it is evident that these converts have in fact abdicated their rational function; they have accepted their belief systems as providing complete and final answers to all questions; they have no tolerance for ambiguity; and they are impervious to evidence and reason.

 We have Michael Shermer to thank for the insight that the same cognitive processes underlie belief in the paranormal, devotion to religious dogma and political ideology, and belief in conspiracy theories, in his book “The Believing Brain”.  These beliefs have in common the tendency to see meaningful patterns in random data (“patternicity”), and then to assign agency to the imaginary patterns, a “man behind the curtain” who is “running things” (“agenticity”).

 Followers of Marxianity will tell you that Earth’s current capitalist socioeconomic systems have been designed by, and are being run by, some sort of shadowy oligarchy, which oppresses the workers and gouges profits from their hides.  

 One would think by now, after the 100% failure rate of planned socialist economies over the last century, that Marxians would begin to understand that such a thing a designing and running an economy is not as simple as they had believed; and that they are imputing superhuman powers to this imaginary oligarchy – mere humans could not possibly pull off such a thing, not even with the best of intentions, for reasons that are becoming ever more clearly understood.

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 We next reviewed the work of James M. Buchanan: a Nobel Prize winning economist who used economic theory to explain political behavior, and who challenged the belief that public servants are motivated more by ideals of service than they are by the same personal motivations that exist for everyone else.  

 Earlier economists had created a model called “perfect competition”, which attempted to demonstrate the conditions under which the price system could allocate resources with maximum efficiency, in a world where no single buyer or seller was large enough to set prices – everyone would be a “price taker”.  The model included such assumptions as the existence of perfect costless knowledge and zero transactions costs.  

 It should be obvious, but is apparently not obvious to everyone, that no such thing is possible in the real world; information and transactions inevitably both have costs.

 Planners and regulators, however, have seized upon the model as justification for intervention – all they believe they have to do by way of justification is to demonstrate a real-world departure from the perfect competition model - with the aim of moving the real world in the direction of this perfect competition ideal.

 Buchanan criticized this rationale for intervention, first on the grounds that the model has unrealistic assumptions, which guarantees that real-world markets will never be a good match for the model; and secondly on the grounds that the apologists for intervention are themselves working from a model of perfect governance, a model which is if anything even less realistic than the model of perfect competition.  

 Perfect governance would mean that regulators would themselves have perfect and costless information, as well as the ability to do real-time measurements and then intervene with perfect timing and effectiveness.

 Fascinating!

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 We then had a look at the life and legacy of the brilliant thinker John Maynard Keynes.  Keynes was one of the most influential economists of all time, and created the field of what we now call macroeconomics.

 Keynes believed that during times of insufficient effective demand, governments could fill in the gaps in demand with changes in taxation and spending (fiscal policy); and it could stimulate demand by changes in the growth rate of the money supply (monetary policy).

 Followers of Keynes have adopted this idea and run with it, advocating continuous intervention rather than the episodic intervention which Keynes had envisioned.  For example, they introduced the idea of “counter-cyclical budgeting”, where government spending was supposed to act as an automatic stabilizer:  there would be budget deficits during downturns and budget surpluses during boom times, due to changes in tax receipts and due to discretionary changes in spending.

 What has actually happened, with very few exceptions, was budget deficits every year. 

 From the Vulcan’s eye view, the field of macroeconomics is best interpreted as a reassertion of the absolute right of governance enjoyed by the feudal nobility; and it is firmly grounded in concepts of intelligent design.

 To us it appears delusional to believe that government policy can be used to “fine-tune” economic outcomes, even if the political will to do so could reasonably be expected.

 American economist Robert Gordon compared trying to steer the economy to trying to steer a car while looking out the rear window on a foggy night, with lags of uncertain timing and uncertain magnitude between the time you turn the steering wheel and the time the car actually turns. 

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 We then demonstrated the conceptual absurdity of Taxing corporate income.  Corporations don’t actually exists and therefore cannot possibly pay taxes; the tax is always ultimately paid by people, most of whom have been convinced that it is not they who are paying the tax.

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 The next discussion was about Anarchy.  It has long been a fond hope of many Earthlings that they could live in a world where no one exerts authority over anyone, in other words, no government.

 Early anarchism advocates, such as Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin believed that Earthlings could live in cooperative communities and share what they produced.  They opposed both government and what they called “capitalism”, because they believed that both government and capitalism were hierarchical social structures which worked hand in hand to oppress and exploit the masses.

 Their characterization of capitalism as an inherently exploitative system was based on fallacious zero-sum thinking, and on the absence of understanding of evolutionary processes – not too surprising because the theory of evolution and the accompanying phenomenon of emergent order were not yet part of the intellectual universe in their time.

 They could not see that the true essence of capitalism is voluntary exchange and a respect for property, which is not to say that their observations of corrupt alliances of government and business were not valid.

 With the exception of Kropotkin, who was a scientist and student of nature, they also uniformly failed to come to grips with the fact of scarcity.  Scarcity is the difference between the sum total of what everyone wants and the sum total of what there is to go around.  Kropotkin understood that scarcity was indeed a problem for a sharing economy, but he believed technological advances would eventually make scarcity a thing of the past.

 In an evolved capitalist system, scarcity is automatically handled by a price system, and order emerges spontaneously based on human action.

 These are the great insights of modern anarcho-capitalists, who claim to see the possibility of an orderly society without any government at all, with even what we now call “public goods”, such a defense, policing and the courts provided by private institutions.

 I personally am skeptical of the notion that Earthlings can do entirely without the institution of government.  Social order emerges within a context of rules, just as the order we observe in the flow of automobile traffic emerges because there are lines on the pavement and stop signs and traffic lights to signal to drivers who has the right of way.

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 Earthlings are continuously bombarded with the idea that people with high incomes are not paying A fair share of taxes.  Anecdotes abound, such as the assertion that Warren Buffett pays less income tax than his secretary does.  

 Leaving aside for the moment the idea that taxing income is a bad idea, it is illuminating to consider what American Earthlings pay in dollars rather than in percentages of income.

 We showed that in dollars, as income increases from low to medium to high, income tax payments for middle earners currently are approximately 14 times as much as for low earners, and income tax payments for high earners are 50 time as much as for medium earners 700 times as much as for low earners.

 We also pointed out that for high earners, the taxes they pay as a percentage of consumption, rather than as a percentage of income, are even more drastically progressive than they appear, simply because high earners spend less and save more of their income.

 We argued that financing government operations with consumption taxes and excise taxes would be a plus for economic efficiency, and it would put legions of professional envy-floggers out of business.

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 The English writer Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Jungle Book, published a poem in 1899 titled The White man’s burden.

 It was an apologia for European colonialism, where the intention of the colonialists was supposedly to “bring non-Europeans up” to where white Europeans were technologically and culturally.  The poem characterized non-white foreigners as “half devil and half child”, people who really needed civilizing.

 These intentions were sincere, even though things on the ground somehow didn’t lead to the intended results.  On the ground, the supposed beneficiaries of the good intentions were treated as subhuman, and they were oppressed and virtually enslaved.

 Earthlings today are still afflicted by other Earthlings with the same attitudes as the colonialists.  The arrogance and self-congratulation of colonialists was echoed in the early progressive movement in the United States, with intelligent design programs such as Indian schools, eugenics, trustbusting and alcohol prohibition.

 The modern progressive movement incorporates the same arrogance and self-congratulation observed amongst European colonialists, and the same reliance on intelligent design – only the details have changed.

 The actual record of early and modern progressivism is every bit as appalling as the record of white European colonialism.

 We hope that Earthlings can convince these well-meaning intelligent designers to just stop helping.

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 The arguments around Free trade, tariffs and quotas should have ended long ago, but the ecnarongis (i.e., ignorance in reverse, or knowing what is not so) have persisted and are still being used to garner political support.

 Earthlings are routinely told that international trade is warfare, where somebody wins and somebody loses, instead of the mutually beneficial partnership that it actually is.  And while it is true that international trade can create disruptions that require adaptation, it is also true that disruptions occur all the time from many sources, and that stasis is not a desirable option, or even a realistic one.

 Fascinating!

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 Might I suggest that our winter hiatus could be a good time, for new listeners especially, to explore earlier podcast essays from this series.  All the Fascinating! essays focus on topics that are not tied to current events, except insofar that events are used to illustrate larger points.  I write about topics that are more of a timeless nature, and I believe you will find the earlier essays as fresh as when they were first published.

 And please look for new episodes in Season 5. 

 Theme music:  Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.

 Live long and prosper.

 Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.

 Savor your experiences and treasure your memories.

 Look forward to a happy and rewarding future.

 And respect nature’s wisdom.